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^3
North Carolina State Library
Raleigh
Sumnten 1966
The North Carolina Historical Review
Christopher Crittenden, Editor in Chief
Mrs. Memory F. Mitchell, Editor
Miss Marie D. Moore, Editorial Associate
ADVISORY EDITORIAL BOARD
John Fries Blair William S. Powell
Miss Sarah M. Lemmon David Stick
Henry S. Stroupe
STATE DEPARTMENT OF ARCHIVES AND HISTORY
EXECUTIVE BOARD
Josh L. Horne, Chairman
Miss Gertrude Sprague Carraway Ralph P. Hanes
T. Harry Gatton Hugh T. Lefler
Fletcher M. Green Edward W. Phifer
Christopher Crittenden, Director
This review was established in January, 1924, as a medium of publication and dis-cussion
of history in North Carolina. It is issued to other institutions by exchange,
but to the general public by subscription only. The regular price is $4.00 per year.
Members of the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, Inc., for which
the annual dues are $5.00, receive this publication without further payment. Back
numbers still in print are available for $1.00 per number. Out-of-print numbers may
be obtained from Kraus Reprint Corporation, 16 East 46th Street, New York, New
York, 10017, or on microfilm from University Microfilms, 313 North First Street, Ann
Arbor, Michigan. Persons desiring to quote from this publication may do so without
special permission from the editors provided full credit is given to the North Caro-lina
Historical Review. The Review is published quarterly by the State Department
of Archives and History, Education Building, Corner of Edenton and Salisbury Streets,
Raleigh, North Carolina, 27601. Mailing address is Box 1881, Raleigh, North Carolina,
27602. Second class postage paid at Raleigh, North Carolina, 27602.
COVER—Raleigh's Fire Department, 1890, showing "Championship"
Volunteer Rescue Steam Fire Engine Company. The building was located
between the courthouse and Pullen Building, predecessor to the Insurance
Building. Photograph by Will Wynne lent by Mrs. James W. Reid. For
an article on Raleigh, see pages 261 to 285.
North Carolina State Library
Raleigh
Volume XLIII Published in July, 1966 Number 3
CONTENTS
RALEIGH-AN EXAMPLE OF THE "NEW SOUTH"? 261
Sarah McCulloh Lemmon
A CARPETBAGGER'S CONVERSION TO
WHITE SUPREMACY 286
Wilton B. Fowler
JOHN ALEXANDER, ANGLICAN MISSIONARY 305
Thomas C. Parramore
JOSEPHUS DANIELS AND THE PUBLICITY CAMPAIGN
FOR NAVAL AND INDUSTRIAL PREPAREDNESS
BEFORE WORLD WAR I 316
Theodore A. Thelander
ANNIE OAKLEY IN THE SOUTH 333
Claude E. Flory
BOOK REVIEWS 344
HISTORICAL NEWS 370
BOOK REVIEWS
v/ Lee, The Lower Cape Fear in Colonial Days, by Herbert R. Paschal 344
Mitchell, Legal Aspects of Conscription and Exemption in
North Carolina, 1861-1865, by Richard Bardolph 345
HORN, Tennessee's War, 1861-1865: Described by Participants,
by Holman Hamilton 346
Isaac, Prohibition and Politics: Turbulent Decades in Tennessee,
1885-1920, by Willard B. Gatewood 347
RICHARDSON, The Negro in the Reconstruction of Florida, 1865-1877,
by Charles W. Arnade 349
Griffin, Newspaper Story of a Town: A History of Danville,
Kentucky, by Robert N. Elliott 349
Culliford, William Strachey, 1572-1621, by James K. Huhta 350
^ Berkeley and Berkeley, The Reverend John Clayton, A Parson with
a Scientific Mind: His Scientific Writings and Other Related
Papers, by Robert W. Ramsey 351
V Wright, The Prose Works of William Byrd of Westover: Narratives
of a Colonial Virginian, by Carlos R. Allen, Jr 352
Bargar, Lord Dartmouth and the American Revolution,
by Barbara Brandon Schnorrenberg 353
Quinn and Skelton, The Principall Navigations Voiages and
Discoveries of the English Nation, by William S. Powell 354
Sachs and Hoogenboom, The Enterprising Colonials: Society on the
Eve of the Revolution, by Jack P. Greene 356
v Grant, American Forts : Yesterday and Today,
by John D. F. Phillips 357
Wynes, The Negro in the South Since 1865: Selected Essays in
American Negro History, by W. B. Yearns 359
Woodard, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, by Paul Murray 359
Link and Patrick, Writing Southern History: Essays in Historio-graphy
in Honor of Fletcher M. Green, by Clement Eaton 361
McCalmon and Moe, Creating Historical Drama: A Guide for the
Community and the Interested Individual, by Arlin Turner 362
^Prince, Steam Locomotives and Boats: Southern Railway System,
by Michael Dunn 363
McCormick, The Second American Party System: Party Formation
in the Jacksonian Era, by William S. Hoffmann 364
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B.
Johnson, Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and
Statements of the President, 1963-196b, by Robert Moats Miller . 365
Other Recent Publications .366
RALEIGH—AN EXAMPLE OF THE "NEW SOUTH"?
By Sarah McCulloh Lemmon*
The term "New South" calls to mind the spectacular rise of Birming-ham
and Atlanta, the speeches and writings of Henry Grady and
"Marse Henry" Watterson, the consolidation of southern railroads, and
the rise of cotton mills, steel mills, and cigarette factories in the
Piedmont crescent from Virginia to Alabama. It has been generally
accepted that the entire South supported the new philosophy, although
the evidence presented has been confined almost entirely to the Pied-mont,
in itself not the major portion of the region.
The question then arises as to the validity of the term "New South"
if it is applied to all of the former Confederate states. A depth study
of minor cities and towns, of Coastal Plain and Blue Ridge Mountains,
should be undertaken to see if for too long historians have let the part
stand for the whole, or if in fact the old generalization holds true. The
present study of Raleigh is one such attempt to discover if a small
town somewhat removed from the chief area of development shared
the views, the ambitions, and the characteristics of the New South.
Four characteristics of the New South as generally described will be
used as guidelines to analyze the changes that took place in Raleigh
between 1876 and 1895. Disregarding agricultural diversification,
which would seem inappropriate for an urban area, these are: the
theme of reconciliation with the North; the quest for industry; the
beginning of public education; and the improvement and modern-ization
of cities. Some events and some spokesmen are included even
though they affected and were affected by Raleigh solely as the capital
of the state.
Among the North Carolinians who spoke or inspired remarks ex-pressing
the hope for reconciliation with the North were United States
Senator Zebulon B. Vance, Captain Samuel A. Ashe, editor of the
Raleigh News and Observer, Governor Thomas Jarvis, the Reverend
Thomas Dixon, Jr., and Governor Thomas M. Holt. Vance pursued a
course in the Senate which attempted to heal the wounds of the war.
An admirer from Virginia, after congratulating him on an excellent
speech, wrote in 1879:
Dr. Lemmon is professor of history, Meredith College, Raleigh.
262 The North Carolina Historical Review
I can only express the hope that the genius, with which you are gifted, may
continue to shed its charming radiance over the hearts and minds of men
—
and in due time, by your influence and that of other patriots, the country
may be brought back to that happy, fraternal association which will unite
all sections in an enduring union.1
The following year Vance was invited by Tammany Hall to address
the citizens of New York City on national issues.
2
Captain Ashe carried on a correspondence with Benjamin S. Pardie,
of the New England Manufacturers' and Mechanics' Institute, which
led to the following letter from the latter in 1882:
If the great end I have in view can be accomplished, viz : a homogeneous
people and as a necessary corollary—a mighty free republic in which every
citizen is a sovereign and in which every man is an illustration of Burn's
[sic] noble idea
"The gowd is but the guineas stamp
A man's a man for a* that"
I shall feel fully paid for labor time & trouble—You and I have been
through the crucible of war as hundreds of thousands of our brave country-men
have—We know now the price our forefathers paid for the liberties
we all enjoy—It is because I believe you, & men of your stamp, love them
as sincerely as we who wore the blue did, that I have talked frankly to
you. . . . [The] one solvent for the small remnant of difference between
the sections is our mutual interest in industrial progress—That will even-tually—
God grant it may be very soon—terminate the sectional rancor
that has cankered our body politic, and make our country healthy and
sound in all its parts
—
3
At the Boston Exposition of 1883 North Carolina had an exhibit, in
conjunction with which the North Carolina Press Association held its
annual meeting and invited Governor Jarvis to speak. Because of the
good reports of his address the Grand Army of the Republic invited
him to address their body, following which they took him to Con-necticut
to speak to the organization there. As Ashe later wrote: "Had
there been any lingering vestiges of unpleasant feeling, they could not
have survived that fortunate occasion. The fountains of patriotism had
been struck and the waters gushed forth."
4
1 Carter M. Louthan to Z. B. Vance, June [?], 1879. Vance Papers, Personal Col-lection,
Archives, State Department of Archives and History, Raleigh, hereinafter
cited as Vance Papers.
2 Richard Croker and Bourke Cockerane to Z. B. Vance, October 17, 1880, Vance
Papers.
3 Benjamin S. Pardie to Samuel A. Ashe, December 2, 1882, Samuel A. Ashe Papers,
Archives, hereinafter cited as Ashe Papers.
* Samuel A'Court Ashe, History of North Carolina (Greensboro: Charles L. Van
Noppen, Vol. I, 1908; Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton, Vol. II, 1925), II, 1187.
Raleigh—An Example of the "New South"? 263
The Reverend Thomas Dixon, Jr., at one time a Raleigh clergyman,
preached a sermon in New York City in which he anticipated that
the Farmers' Alliance would reduce sectionalism and help men to
"forget the bitterness of the past and throw off the curse of traditional
sectionalism." 5 Edwin A. Alderman was also noted as an exemplar of
good will toward the North.6 One of the best examples of this spirit
was the speech by Governor Holt at the opening of the Southern
Inter-States Exposition in Raleigh in 1891, in which he said:
Let all North Carolinians and all Southerners prove themselves worthy
descendants of the fathers who have glorified Southern annals. Let us take
by the hand with a cordial grasp the citizens of any other section who
seek Southern hospitality ... to bring together the people of all sections
under a common flag, and with aspirations for a common destiny of un-paralleled
grandeur in this favored Southern land. . . . Loyal to its own
customs and institutions, true to its honorable past, it would gladly forget
in the happy career expanding before it that there had ever been occasion
for drawing the sword.7
Thus both North Carolina and Raleigh had their share in furthering
reconciliation between the South and the North.
The second point considered characteristic of the New South was
the growth of manufacturing, the most common instance of which
was the "cotton mill crusade/' The desire to "out-Yankee the Yankee"
led to "remission of taxes for a term to encourage the location of a
plant. . . . [Enterprisers] were cried up as Messiahs, and the general
public made itself an informal chamber of commerce to advance the
industry." 8 As early as 1882 a reporter from the Atlantic Monthly
noted "the extremely happy and satisfied feeling of the manufacturers,
and their confident hopefulness in regard to their business in the
future . . . their somewhat exultant and triumphant mood. They are
. . . extending this industry with great energy and rapidity." He noted
that offers of more northern capital than they needed were being re-ceived.
9 The annual reports on the state of business which were pre-sented
in the Manufacturers' Record were widely quoted and noted
in southern newspapers, usually producing such remarks as contained
in this editorial from the State Chronicle in Raleigh in 1888:
6 State Chronicle (Raleigh), December 17, 1890, hereinafter cited as State Chronicle.
8 Dumas Malone, Edwin A. Alderman (New York: Doubleday, 1940), 94, herein-after
cited as Malone, Edwin A. Alderman.
7 State Chronicle, October 2, 1891.
8 Broadus Mitchell and George Sinclair Mitchell, The Industrial Revolution in the
South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1930), 11.
""Studies in the South," Atlantic Monthly, XLIX (June, 1882), 746.
264 The North Carolina Historical Review
1887 in the way of the increase in numbers and capital invested in manu-facturing
enterprises in the South has been a most remarkable one. . . .
Think of it! Two hundred and fifty-six million dollars invested in new
enterprises in one year ! This is a gratifying showing. . . .
10
Florence, Alabama; Norfolk, Virginia; and even country villages were
making their efforts to secure investors who would transform them
overnight into metropolises, as shown in a half-page advertisement in
the News and Observer extolling the virtues of Bedford City, Virginia,
with miles of streets lighted by electricity, factories and mills running
full time, "The beautiful booming town by the Blue Ridge!" n
North Carolina took full part in the drive to secure industry. It was
obvious to the thinking men of the state that water power brought in
more money than farming.12 The story dramatically told by the
Mitchells in The Rise of Cotton Mills in the South and The Industrial
Revolution in the South need not be repeated here. It was not only
cotton mills, however; it was much, much more. The furniture industry
began at High Point in the 1880's;
13 the cottonseed oil industry was
started;
14 a good quality of china clay was worked beginning in
1888; 15 and the rise of the bright tobacco industry transformed Dur-ham
and many another town into busy cities.
16 W. H. Malone wrote
to Captain Ashe, in support of the proposal that Vance be appointed
Commissioner of Patents in Washington, "North Carolina is already
outstripping most of the Southern States in the number of patents on
new and useful inventions." 1T One bright reporter suggested a new
industry for the state—the canning of preserved persimmons.18 There
was a revival of efforts to mine corundum, mica, monazite, and cop-per.
19 The state's first iron and steel mill was built at Greensboro in
1890.20 The extension of railroads and their consolidation into the
10 State Chronicle, January 5, 1888.
u News and Observer (Raleigh), August 31, 1890, hereinafter cited as News and
Observer.
"Broadus Mitchell, The Rise of Cotton Mills in the South (Baltimore: Johns Hop-kins
Press, 1921), 144, hereinafter cited as Mitchell, The Rise of Cotton Mills.
"Paul H. Buck, The Road to Reunion (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1938), 179.
14 New South (Wilmington), December 24, 1882, hereinafter cited as New South.
15 [James Curtis Ballagh, (ed.)], Economic History, Volume VI of The South in
the Building of the Nation, edited by Julian Alvin Carroll Chandler and Others
(Richmond: Southern Historical Publication Society, 12 volumes, c. 1909-1913), 208,
hereinafter cited as Ballagh, Economic History.
"Nannie May Tilley, The Bright-Tobacco Industry, 1860-1929 (Chapel Hill: Uni-versity
of North Carolina Press, 1948), passim. A brief summary of the rise of
Durham, emphasizing its industrial growth, may be found in William Kenneth Boyd,
The Story of Durham: City of the New South (Durham: Duke University Press,
1925).
17 W. H. Malone to Samuel A. Ashe, December 4, 1884, Ashe Papers.
w New South, December 24, 1882.
19 Ballagh, Economic History, 235-237 ; Raleigh Register, March 4, 1885.
80 State Chronicle, September 2, 1890.
Raleigh—An Example of the "New South" ? 265
Southern Railway System and the Seaboard Air Line was proceeding
rapidly. As a sign of returning prosperity, one editor happily stated
that "it should serve to encourage all of us in the hope for better
times." 21
The city of Raleigh shared in this industrial interest, seeking ear-nestly,
if not too enthusiastically, to secure new industry. Talk about
building a cotton factory began as early as 1875, when the editor of
the Daily Constitution wrote:
How about that cotton factory? Wilmington has one, Charlotte is thinking
about establishing one and Raleigh should not be behind the times. Mer-chants
and capitalists, awake from your lethargy, and see if something
cannot be done toward adding this improvement to our enterprising city.22
Apparently there were no results, for thirteen years later Editor
Josephus Daniels reported that a meeting had been called to discuss
the establishment of a cotton factory.
23 Mayor Alfred A. Thompson
and merchant W. C. Stronach wrote in a letter to the editor: "The
establishment of a cotton mill here would be of such great advantage
to the growth of Raleigh, and the interest manifested by many of our
leading business men in that direction, induces us to call a meeting,"
which was duly held in the mayor's office in January, 1888. Their letter
continued:
If the large amount of capital now invested by our citizens in bonds and
mortgages could be devoted to the establishment of cotton mills . . . the
real estate of the city would rapidly increase in value, and hundreds of
employees would earn a living who now find it very difficult to find em-ployment.
24
Following the meeting, a committee was appointed to collect all the
needful information on erecting and operating a mill, with ten of the
city's most prominent citizens serving on it.
25 "All Together," cried
the State Chronicle, which pointed out that the Durham mills were
paying 20 per cent dividends, while Concord paid 34 per cent. A mill
in Raleigh would give jobs to people, who then would spend the money
in the community. "All the money expended in wages is put into cir-
21 News and Observer, January 31, 1886.
22 Daily Constitution (Raleigh), July 9, 1875.
28 State Chronicle, January 26, 1888.
24 State Chronicle, January 26, 1888.
25 State Chronicle, February 2, 1888. The ten were: W. C. Stronach, chairman;
G. E. Leach, E. B. Barbee, G. Rosenthal, C. E. Johnson, J. J. Thomas, W. S. Prim-rose,
C. G. Latta, N. B. Broughton, and A. A. Thompson.
266 The North Carolina Historical Review
culation, and the merchants secure an increase of trade by reason of
the amounts paid out to operatives in the factory." "Enterprise begets
enterprise," continued the Chronicle. "One factory insures the building
of others." Rhetorically asking if Raleigh could succeed in getting a
mill, the paper proceeded:
It will [succeed] if the capitalists of Raleigh will for once pull together.
It will if those who have money will examine the reports of the cotton mills
in the State and invest their money where it will pay best. It will if all
our people will look this question squarely in the face : What is to become
of Raleigh unless we do something to increase its business? 26
Yet by September there was still no mill. A Chamber of Industry and
Commerce, however, had been organized in August of that year; it
began to push the project.
27 By the following May $62,000 had been
raised and directors chosen;28
in July six acres near the railroad were
purchased, and officers for the company were elected; 29 by March
of 1890 the building was ready for machinery to be installed.
30 At this
point the treasurer began having difficulty in collecting money pledged,
and the following notice appeared in the papers: "A few have not paid
the full amount due on stock in Raleigh cotton mills. The last install-ment
was due Apr. 15th and those who have not yet paid are requested
to do so without further delay." 31 Encouragement was offered by way
of a gentleman who may have been fictitious. This gentleman was
reported to have visited the partly completed mill and to have said:
Now, listen to me : A Raleigh cotton mill can pay just as great a per cent
as any mill any where, and I want to record a prophecy right here, right
now, that the Raleigh mill will make as good a report after the first year
as any mill operated in this whole country. You will see it too.32
In spite of this encouragement, in July it became necessary to issue
$50,000 in 6 per cent bonds to obtain sufficient fluid cash to complete
the factory and put it into operation.33 This was followed with addi-tional
propagandizing to the effect that "the building of the cotton
28 State Chronicle, February 2, 1888.
'"State Chronicle, September 14, 1888.
28 State Chronicle, May 24, 1889.
29 State Chronicle, July 12, 1889. The officers were: Julius Lewis, president; John H.
Winder, vice-president; George V. Strong, Jr., secretary-treasurer; and C. H. Belvin,
director.
30 News and Observer, March 4, 1890.
31 Daily State Chronicle (Raleigh), April 25, 1890, hereinafter cited as Daily State
Chronicle. (The weekly State Chronicle continued under the same editorship.)
32 Daily State Chronicle, May 10, 1890.
33 Daily State Chronicle, July 19, 1890.
North Carolina State Library
Raleigh
Raleigh—An Example of the "New South"? 267
Raleigh's first cotton mills began operating in 1890; this picture was taken in 1920.
Photograph from files of State Department of Archives and History.
factory, now nearing completion, had just shown Raleigh how to build
factories"; the opinion of "a big business man" was "that there would
be another one built here very soon. In fact a movement had already
begun in that direction." 34 In August, 1890, the mill finally began
operation, and the superintendent sent the first cotton ever combed
in Raleigh as a tribute to Josephus Daniels at the Chronicle. Said the
editor, "It is evidence of the opening of a new industrial era. It means
employment of people and circulation of money. Boom the mills on
to colossal success, and may many more mills follow—all success-fully."
35 The first shipment was made to Philadelphia in September,36
and by October 1,500 pounds of spun yarn were being produced
daily.
37 The mill was described as "a handsome two-story brick struc-ture,
ornamented at either corner with imposing towers and equipped
with the most improved factory machinery." Located in the northwest
section of the city on the Raleigh and Gaston Railroad, it had 6,000
spindles, operated eleven hours a day, and was to be surrounded by
34 Daily State Chronicle, July 19, 1890.
35 Daily State Chronicle, August 7, 1890.
86 News and Observer, September 4, 1890.
87 News and Observer, October 11, 1890.
268 The North Carolina Historical Review
company houses for the operatives.38 Thus began Raleigh's first cotton
mill, to be followed in the next two years by two others.
39
One of the means employed to interest foreign capital in southern
investments was the exposition. The period of the New South was
noted for its many expositions, among the most famous being the
International Cotton Exposition in Atlanta in 1881 and the Piedmont
Exposition in the same city in 1887. The two expositions held in
Raleigh were not as well known, although "the North Carolina indus-trial
exhibit, at Raleigh, in 1884, carried on the Atlanta spirit and made
it local to the State in a way that assisted cotton mill growth."40 A
brochure setting forth the plans for the exposition explained that the
recent display by North Carolina of her products at Boston—the same
event which led to one of the reconciliation speeches described earlier
—aroused interest in having one of her own. It was designed to show
the variety of products in the state, the native woods, minerals, fish-eries,
cattle, water power and manufactured goods, vacation areas,
good transportation, and the special advantages of each county. The
planning committee hoped that as a result of the exposition, North
Carolina would see that there were no intrastate antagonistic interests,
capital would spread out around the state, buyers and investors from
other states would become interested, and farming methods would be
improved.41 Erected in the western part of the city near the present
campus of North Carolina State University, the main building was
very large, with battlements and flagstaffs. A spur of the railroad ran
directly into the building to facilitate unloading the heavy machinery
exhibited there.
42 A central hall, a grandstand, and a machinery
shed completed the buildings.43 At noon on October 1 the exhibit
formally opened; buildings and grounds were electrically lighted, and
flowers had been especially planted. The Raleigh Register admired
it as far surpassing its predecessors, and as "a grateful surprise" even
to its friends. "There has been nothing like it" in North Carolina, it
concluded.44 The "deportment" of the visitors and the beauty of the
women were commended. An exhibit of native gems from Macon
38 North Carolina Intelligencer (Raleigh), November 5, 1890, hereinafter cited as
North Carolina Intelligencer.
39 Although Mitchell, The Rise of Cotton Mills, 136, states that the first cotton mill
in Raleigh was erected in 1887, it is apparent that 1890 is the correct date.
40 Mitchell, The Rise of Cotton Mills, 125.
41 The North Carolina State Exposition from Oct. 1 to Oct. 28th, 188U. A prospectus
(Raleigh: n.p., 1884), 3-4.
42 Raleigh Register, July 23, 1884.
^Visitor's Guide to the North Carolina State Exposition, 188U (n.p., n.d.), 69-71,
hereinafter cited as Visitor's Guide.
"Raleigh Register, October 8, 1884.
Raleigh—An Example of the "New South" ? 269
Exhibits of many kinds were featured at the Industrial Exposition held in Raleigh
in 1884.
An exhibit featuring tobacco and tobacco machinery was called "North Carolina's
Bright Hope." Both photographs on this page from files of State Department of
Archives and History.
270 The North Carolina Historical Review
County was admired, and a table made by a Wake County man from
60 varieties of native wood cut into 275 blocks was noted.45 Among
the main mechanical exhibits were pipe-fitting machinery, looms in
operation, car wheels and brake shoes, a cotton gin, electric-light
machinery, knitting by steam, and roller corn mills. The State Board
of Agriculture displayed minerals, wines, tobacco, fruits in jars, fish,
birds, edible reptiles, fertilizers, and native woods. The Wake County
exhibit, of which a Raleigh man was chairman, had in addition to the
usual agricultural products samples of ladies' needlework, photo-graphs
of public buildings and residences, serpentine, granite, a pyra-mid
of fruit trees, a 100-horsepower Watts Campbell Corliss engine,
and a 50-horsepower Harris Corliss engine.46 The city aldermen set
up a Bureau of Intelligence to help visitors find room and board while
they were in Raleigh. The aldermen hoped many people would come
from Pennsylvania and New England.47 Financially the exhibition
was a success, but perhaps more important were the effects on the
state. According to the local press, new friendships were formed,
local jealousies were curtailed, better sectional understanding was
promoted, patriotism was increased, and an honest pride coupled
with generous rivalry was promoted. A repeat performance was urged
for the next year.48
A touch of humor was provided by one William D. Harrington, an
eighty-five-year-old gentleman from Ephronia, who opposed the expo-sition
from the beginning on the ground that its great expense would
cause the Democrats to lose the coming election. He asked: "Now
which had you rather have, a great exposition and a radical Governor,
or a poor exposition and a Democratic Governor?" He urged its post-ponement
until after November.49 His fears, however, proved ground-less.
In 1891 a smaller exposition was held, officially entitled the South-ern
Inter-States Exposition.50 At a meeting of the Raleigh Chamber of
Commerce in December, 1890, A. A. Thompson had moved the ap-pointment
of a State Exposition Committee to initiate another expo-sition;
Colonel W. S. Primrose, chairman of the 1884 exposition, had
been made chairman of the committee; and plans had proceeded.51
45 Raleigh Register, October 22, 1884.
"Visitor's Guide, 75-87.
47 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, City of Raleigh, July 11, 1884, Municipal
Building, Raleigh, hereinafter cited as Minutes of the Board of Aldermen.
"Raleigh Register, October 29, 1884.
49 William D. Harrington to Samuel A. Ashe, April 19, 1884, Ashe Papers.
60 State Chronicle, October 1, 1891.
61 Daily State Chronicle, December 10, 1890.
Raleigh—An Example of the "New South"? 271
Raleigh raised $8,500 and the Southern Inter-State Immigration Bu-reau
completed the sponsorship.52 Running from October 1 to Novem-ber
28, the 1891 exposition had representation from thirteen states. On
opening day all business in Raleigh was suspended and Fayetteville
Street was lined with thousands of people to watch the "grand pa-rade."
53 Apparently this fair was not a financial success, for the
State Chronicle declared after it was over, "It may not have been so
much of a success as was wished, but it has certainly done Raleigh
good in many ways." 54
Also doing Raleigh good in many ways was its new Chamber of
Commerce, formed on August 28, 1888, with Major R. S. Tucker as
its first president. At the end of his first year in office he made a
speech summarizing the progress of the city during that time. If one
recalls the inordinate length of time it took the city to start a cotton
mill, one can appreciate the major's opening remarks:
Raleigh had a slow but steady growth these past long years, and now
(1888) appeared to be at a standstill . . . dull, and without energy . . .
somewhat disheartened. The failure, just before this time, of one of our
banks, had cast a gloom over the city. Something was necessary to be
done to give hope and confidence to our people.
Continuing, he said: "The organization of our Chamber at once in-spired
the hope for better times." 55
It would seem that it indeed had
something to do with the increased tempo of new industry, for a list
of the manufactories begun during 1888-1889 and cited by the major
included: North Carolina Wagon Company, Greystone Granite and
Construction Company, Raleigh Cotton Factory, Cider and Vinegar
Manufactory, Wetmore Shoe and Leather Company, two additional
tobacco warehouses, and a suspender company. The first refrigerator
cars carried grapes from Raleigh to the North in July, 1889. The most
important immediate task, concluded the major, was to enlarge the
tobacco interests.
56 Exulted the Chronicle, "It is absolutely certain
that Raleigh is destined to be a large and important manufacturing
centre." 57
Other industries not mentioned by the president of the Chamber
of Commerce included the Oak City Steam Laundry, founded in
62 State Chronicle, October 1, 1891.
68 Raleigh Signal, October 10, 1891.
"State Chronicle, November 28, 1891.
65 State Chronicle, September 13, 1889.
68 State Chronicle, September 13, 1889.
67 Daily State Chronicle, April 23, 1890.
272 The North Carolina Historical Review
1887; 58 Messrs. Barbee and Pope's candy manufactory; 59 a phosphate
fertilizer business in which rock was brought from Wilmington and
crushed in Raleigh;60 the Raleigh Paper Company;61 and a nursery
business which shipped thousands of rose cuttings to the northern
markets.62 The Raleigh ice factory opened in 1890, making eight tons
of ice per day,63 shortly followed by a second.64 The Caraleigh Mills,
manufacturing dress gingham and employing 250 men by the end of
the nineties, opened in 1892; and the Pilot Cotton Mills employing
175 workers began operation in 1893.65 The Raleigh and Gaston Rail-road
shops turned out a locomotive in 1890 that "for speed, strength
and splendid finish cannot be excelled by any piece of work in Amer-ica."
66 As Daniels of the Chronicle remarked in 1890:
Raleigh doesn't exactly boom, but she moves. There is never a month that
something permanently substantial is not effected. There is talk now of a
furniture factory. Two gentlemen of Tennessee have offered to put $11,000
into a $20,000 plant. That settles it. The factory will come. It will arrive
on schedule time next fall.67
He was right—it did come.
The biggest disappointment to Raleigh citizens was that the city
never became important in the new and valuable tobacco industry.
The first tobacco ever brought to Raleigh to market was sold on
September 26, 1884, in a small temporary warehouse. At the time,
Governor Jarvis made a speech predicting a fine future for the city.
During the next three months, three large warehouses were erected.68
Two plug and chewing tobacco firms were begun, producing such
brands as Pogue's Premium, Imperial, Old Reb, and Nickle Plate.
69
But the longed-for cigarette factory never materialized. In 1890 the
Chamber of Commerce met to hear proposals for a tobacco manufac-tory.
One E. L. Harris of Wilton in Granville County offered to give
the machinery if Raleigh would put up $6,000 in cash.70 Although
68 News and Observer, August 24, 1899.
69 News and Observer, April 3, 1890.
60 News and Observer, January 27, 1886.
81 News and Observer, July 13, 1890.
62 Julian Ralph, Dixie: or Southern Scenes and Sketches (New York: Harpers,
1895), 285.
63 News and Observer, February 21, 1890.
64 News and Observer, March 12, 1890.
85 News and Observer, August 24, 1899.
68 News and Observer, January 28, 1890.
67 Daily State Chronicle, March 20, 1890.
68 State Chronicle, October 18, 1892.
69 News and Observer, October 18, 1890.
70 Daily State Chronicle, September 3, 1890.
Raleigh—An Example of the "New South"? 273
the businessmen agreed to try, no evidence was found of their suc-cess.
Another disappointment was the lack of a boiler and iron works.
The Chronicle recorded an inquiry received from Chattanooga con-cerning
such a mill in the city. The editor replied, "Now, wouldn't
it have been a good thing if the answer could have been an imme-diate,
positive and flatfooted yes!" Raleigh was already attracting
wide attention, he continued, but needed "a little more unity, a little
more energy, and [a] little more snap." "Everybody loves a vigorous,
busy people and likes to come among them," he concluded almost
appealingly.71
In spite of the failures, the accomplishments were meritorious. At
the Chamber of Commerce banquet in April, 1890, the toasts offered
indicated some hesitancy still to commit the businessmen of the city
to an all-out campaign for industrialization, yet a sufficient pride in
accomplishments already achieved showed a cautious willingness to
proceed a little further. The first toast was: "Our City Government:
Progressive in all that pertains to the material welfare of our city
consistent with economy in expenditure and consideration of the citi-zens."
Following this were other toasts to: the Raleigh Chamber of
Commerce and Industry, the Manufacturing Interests of Raleigh, the
Raleigh Cotton Exchange, the Raleigh Tobacco Exchange, Our Edu-cational
Institutions, Our Railroad Facilities, Our City Press, and
finally, to the Future Possibilities of North Carolina as a Manufac-turing
State.
72
Raleigh attempted to keep up to date with the latest business
machines and methods. What was certainly one of the early type-writers
in the state belonged to Judge Walter Clark. To him, in 1886,
the following letter was addressed from the Governor's secretary:
I am instructed by Governor Scales to enquire of you, if you desire to sell
your caligraph and if so what amount would you take for it? The Gover-nor
would also like to know your opinion of its merits as a writing ma-chine.
73
It was not recorded whether or not the machine was sold to the Gov-ernor.
Stronach's store had the first National Cash Register in the
city, installed in January, 1886. Captain Ashe's description makes
amusing reading today:
71 Daily State Chronicle, April 17, 1890.
72 Daily State Chronicle, April 29, 1890.
73 C. N. Armfield to Walter Clark, January 8, 1886, Aubrey Lee Brooks and Hugh
Talmage Lefler (eds.), The Papers of Walter Clark (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2 volumes, 1948-1950), I, 225, 225n.
274 The North Carolina Historical Review
Pressing one or more of the keys rings a bell, opens the cash drawer, shows
the amount of the sale on one or more tablets in the glass opening above,
and records the amount on wheels inside, which are accessible only to the
proprietor, and the record once made cannot be changed without his knowl-edge.
74
The store of Messrs. Julius Lewis and Company began an ingenious
system of tapping a bell from their office to call a clerk—each one had
a certain number of taps.
75 The Singer Sewing Machine Company
gave a demonstration of fancy embroidery on one of its machines;
on April 4 the demonstrator made lilies.
76 That same month the first
phonograph in town was displayed at Briggs' hardware store; one
turned the crank and out came the strains of a brass band.77 Contests
were held among the members of the Raleigh Short-Hand Writers
Association, to which ten members belonged; a need for more persons
skilled in shorthand was expressed, however.78 An "interesting and
novel" machine arrived in 1890 which cut metal keys "as easily as a
baker can [cut] a horse cake from a bunch of dough." 79 Ten days
later an electric nickel-plated cigar lighter created much excitement
at Simpson's drug store.
80 Not to be outdone, the Department of Agri-culture
purchased the first comptometer to be put into use in Ra-leigh.
81 A letter written by one Thomas H. Sutton dated March 28,
1892, was typed, signed with a red stamp, and bore a red seal on
which was printed, "Dictated to phonograph." 82 North Carolinians
obviously did not wish to be left behind in the use of the latest inven-tions
in the business world.
A third characteristic of the New South was an interest in educa-tional
progress. There was some interest in private education, espe-cially
on the college level, but the chief concern was public education
on the elementary level. Both North Carolina and Raleigh had active
leaders in this field.
The state of public education was far from admirable in 1875 and
even later. In 1890 North Carolina was third from the bottom in the
nation in literacy; by 1900 she had fallen to the bottom in spite of
74 News and Observer, January 26, 1886.
™News and Observer, April 1, 1890.
76 News and Observer, April 3, 1890.
17 News and Observer, April 26, 1890.
78 Daily State Chronicle, May 7, 1890.
79 News and Observer, August 13, 1890.
80 News and Observer, August 23, 1890.
81 State Chronicle, September 9, 1891.
82 Thomas H. Sutton to Samuel A. Ashe [? no inside address], March 28, 1892,
Ashe Papers.
Raleigh—An Example of the "New South"? 275
having decreased her illiteracy rate some 13 per cent.
83 In his annual
report, the North Carolina state superintendent of public instruction
in 1890 voiced a plea for teachers who were trained. He said, "I
believe that professional training is as necessary for a teacher as for
a physician." He deplored the fact that teachers taught only until
marriage or a good business offer came along, and he praised the
German professional attitude toward teaching.84
Among the early voices raised for improvement of education was
that of Walter Hines Page, who in 1884 in Raleigh organized the
famous Watauga Club. Among those inspired by Page to do some-thing
about the problem were Charles Mclver and Edwin A. Alder-man,
85 both of whom later had outstanding careers as educators.
Page's most famous speech in support of education was "The For-gotten
Man," delivered in 1897 at the new State Normal College for
Women in Greensboro.86 Mclver and Alderman began the task of
holding summer institutes for teacher training.
87 A winter institute
was held in Wake County by Alderman in 1890, to which both the
general public and the teachers were invited.88 By 1895 a teacher
could attend summer school at the University of North Carolina and
be refreshed on Herbartian pedagogy, educational psychology, Latin,
history, English, and the sciences—a total choice of 26 courses offered
by 19 instructors.89 In Raleigh around 1883 a book seller, Alfred
Williams and Company, started publishing the North Carolina
Teacher, a magazine intended to advertise books but also to promote
progressive education.90
The state of North Carolina by law in the session of 1876-1877
authorized the first graded public schools. In a city of 2,000 people,
100 citizens might petition for a special tax to support a school, said
tax to be subject to a referendum. The tax might not exceed one-tenth
of 1 per cent on the value of property.91 In 1881 additional laws
83 Philip Alexander Bruce, The Rise of the New South, Volume XVII of The His-tory
of North America (Philadelphia: George Barrie & Sons, 1905), 344-345, herein-after
cited as Bruce, The Rise of the New South.
8i News and Observer, March 30, 1890.
85 Burton J. Hendrick, Life and Letters of Walter H. Page (Garden City, New
York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 3 volumes, 1922), I, 73, hereinafter cited as Hendrick,
Life of Walter H. Page.
86 Hendrick, Life of Walter H. Page, I, 74-79.
87 News and Observer, April 3, 1890.
88 News and Observer, December 2, 1890.
80 Malone, Edwin A. Alderman, 61.
90 Rose Howell Holder, Mclver of North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1957), 60.
91 William T. Dortch, John Manning, and John S. Henderson, The Code of North
Carolina, Enacted March 2, 1883 (New York: Banks & Brothers, Law Publishers, 2
volumes, 1883), II, c. 15, ss. 2654-2658, hereinafter cited as Code of 1883.
276 The North Carolina Historical Review
This photograph of the old Centennial School was taken in 1931. From files of
State Department of Archives and History.
created the position of superintendent of public instruction, set up
county school systems,92 and declared that the school year should
begin on the first Monday in December.93
Taking advantage of these provisions, Raleigh in 1877 became the
second city in the state to set up a public graded school.
94 This was
appropriately named Centennial School. Not a great deal is known
about this school until 1884, when the Board of Aldermen began to
look for a better home for the school. By action of the board, the old
Governor's Palace was purchased from the state for $10,000, a little
over half being paid in cash.95 After investigating the cost of remodel-ing,
the board decided to erect a new building on the same site. This
new school was to have a "Slate Roof, Brown Stone Window sills and
Penitentiary Press Brick Front." 96 Although $15,000 was appropriated
for the building, an additional $10,000 was needed to provide slate
blackboards, fences, cloakrooms, carpet on the platforms, water
closets, and stoves for the pupils.97 Finally, on November 30, 1885,
the new school was appropriately and ceremoniously dedicated.98 The
January report, however, indicated that the school had not enough
places to hang the children's wraps.99 The popular and hard-working
superintendent of the city schools during those years was Edward
92 Code of 1883, II, c. 15, ss. 2540-2542, 2545-2575.
93 Code of 1883, II, c. 15, s. 2587.
94 Edgar W. Knight, Public School Education in North Carolina (Boston: Houghton,
Mifflin, 1916), 313.
95 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, February 1, 1884.
98 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, July 3, 1885.
97 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, October 21, 1885.
98 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, November 30, 1885.
99 News and Observer, January 29, 1886.
Raleigh—An Example of the "New South" ? 277
Pearson Moses, formerly of Goldsboro, a man of "magnetic person-ality"
and known as "a lover of learning." 100 His annual report to the
Sublic in 1890 shows the influence of the new school of educational
leory. He remarked, "Observation rather than hearsay testimony
should be the basis of knowledge." He reported that the children
learned to draw from nature; that they used the phonic method of
reading; that arithmetic was being taught "objectively"; that compo-sition
had improved; that boys in the fifth, sixth, and seventh grades
were learning clay-modeling, paper and pasteboard work; that girls
in the first three grades were learning to sew. He expected the recent
introduction of vocal music to prove very popular. Moses pointed out
the need for good school libraries in the teaching of history and
advocated the teaching of at least one foreign language. He believed
that the geography lessons were poor, as they called for too much
memorization. Spelling he stressed: "The time for a child to learn to
spell a word is the instant the child has occasion to write that word
for the first time." He further declared that nothing but the three R's
year after year was not good enough for the education of an Ameri-can.
Ten-year-old boys should have botany, zoology, chemistry, as-tronomy,
mineralogy, and mechanics, to name a few courses which
he believed desirable in the graded school curriculum.101
Under the leadership of Moses, Murphey School for girls was es-tablished
and grew as did Washington Graded School for Negroes.
By 1888 Centennial had an enrollment of 408 boys and Murphey
had 454 girls.
102 No figures were found for Washington.
In 1888 a crisis threatened the Raleigh public schools; the Raleigh
School Committee ran out of funds on March 1. It will be recalled
that according to the state law, only one-tenth of 1 per cent tax could
be levied for the support of schools, which was inadequate for the
type of education Raleigh was attempting to provide. The school
committee requested the aldermen to apply to the state legislature
for the power to double the tax rate,
103 which the legislature oblig-ingly
did.104 Many conservative businessmen in the city, however,
opposed an increase in taxes for the current year, so that a comprom-ise
was effected in order to keep the schools open. This compromise
diverted money from city streets and improvements to meet the
100 M. C. S. Noble, A History of the Public Schools of North Carolina (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1930), 405.
101 News and Observer, March 30, 1890. ™ State Chronicle, September 21, 1888.
108 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, December 17, 1888. ™ State Chronicle, February 15, 1889.
278 The North Carolina Historical Review
current school needs, while a bond issue was to replace the street
funds. Thus taxes would not have to be increased until the following
year. A tuition fee of $5.00 was to be charged each pupil who took
Latin and higher mathematics.105 Thus the school year was com-pleted.
In June the referendum on doubling the school taxes was
held and carried by a vote of 2,688 for to 1,718 against.
106
In 1889 the economy-minded aldermen reduced the number of
grades from eight to seven, "it being the sense of this Board to dis-approve
of higher education in the graded schools at the public
expense." 107 Moses disapproved of this action heartily, suggesting
that the eighth grade was the best one for learning. If this grade was
to be lost, he recommended raising the entrance age to seven years,
for "I believe that one thousand dollars spent for the education of
children over twelve will do as much good as three thousand dollars
spent for those under eight or nine." 108 Thomas H. Briggs, secretary
of the Raleigh Graded School Committee, likewise disapproved of
the loss of the eighth grade. He asserted that "some of our brightest
pupils have been cut off entirely from school privileges just at a time
when they would be most benefited." He also regretted the tuition fee
for Latin, as it deprived many bright pupils of this training.
109 But
the decision of the aldermen was firm. As far as secondary education
is concerned, Raleigh did not have a public high school until 1904.110
The final characteristic of the New South may be called civic pride;
southern cities were acquiring parks, electricity, sewerage, "pure"
water, electric street cars, and paved streets.
111 As Daniels wrote in
the Chronicle:
The same spirit that established the "Centennial Graded School," also de-mands
and will secure well-paved, well-lighted and well-drained streets,
good police, efficient sanitary regulations, public parks, street railways,
Christian associations, public libraries and reading rooms, public hospitals
and dispensaries, water-works, homes for the destitute, art galleries, mu-seums,
night schools for workingmen, and the other manifold blessings of
modern civilization which are secured by public spirited co-operation as-sisted
by private generosity.112
105 State Chronicle, March 22, 1889.
108 State Chronicle, June 14, 1889.
107 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, February 7, 1889.
108 News and Observer, March 30, 1890.
109 News and Observer, March 30, 1890.
110 Mary Lynch Johnson, A History of Meredith College (Raleigh: Meredith Col-lege,
1956), 60.
111 Bruce, The Rise of the New South, 248.
112 State Chronicle, March 1, 1889.
Raleigh—An Example of the "New South"? 279
He implied criticism of the stinginess of certain Raleighites, saying:
"In Raleigh we put most of our money in the banks and we do not
boom." 113
If Raleigh would only build an opera house, a $100,000
hotel, a street railway to Pullen Park, a beltline railroad, and organize
a land improvement company, she would reach a population of
100,000 by 1900, wrote "A Believer in Raleigh." 114 The Daily Evening
Visitor pointed out, "There are a great many things to be done to
place our beautiful city in the front. Let us be up and doing. Give
politics a rest for two years." 115
One of the first modern improvements to reach the city was the
telephone. In 1879 an Edison telephone system was installed, the
first in North Carolina.116 Because of a patent fight in the courts,
however, in 1881 the Bell system replaced the Edison.117 Permission
was granted by the Board of Aldermen in 1881 for the Bell Telephone
Company to erect poles and run wires, provided the company paid
the city a tax of 80 cents per telephone per year.
118 By 1890 a total of
177 customers had installed telephones.119 In the same year a tele-phone
was installed at the State Fairgrounds for the convenience of
the businessmen and for use in case a telegram was received in the
city for any visitor to the fair.
120 Discussion was revived of the possi-bilities
of linking Durham and Raleigh by phone,121 but this was not
soon accomplished. The Postal Telegraph seems to have come to
Raleigh before Western Union, receiving a franchise in 1889.122 By
the following year the line to Savannah, Georgia, was finished and
messages could be sent there directly from Raleigh.123 Other connec-tions
were also made.
No city would be healthful or comfortable without an adequate
supply of water, and much of the time at each meeting of the Board
of Aldermen was taken up with discussions of wells, pumps, water
works, and the like. Beginning in 1870 the aldermen were urged to
proceed with "the establishment of water works on a scale commen-
113 State Chronicle, April 12, 1889.
114 Daily State Chronicle, September 5, 1890.
115 Daily Evening Visitor (Raleigh), November 4, 1890, hereinafter cited as Daily
Evening Visitor.
116 Marker on West Martin Street, Raleigh, indicating site of first telephone ex-chamnge.
See also scattered issues of the News and Observer, July-September, 1879. News and Observer, January 26, 1881.
118 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, December 9, 1881.
119 News and Observer, September 16, 1890.
120 News and Observer, September 13, 1890.
121 News and Observer, November 14, 1890.
122 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, February 1, 1889.
123 News and Observer, February 12, 1890.
280 The North Carolina Historical Review
surate with the demands of the city."
124 The minutes are filled with
petitions such as one requesting a well on Hillsboro Street west of
the railroad bridge, and a pump at the intersection of Person and
Edenton Streets.
125 By 1881 the city fathers had decided to plan a
city-wide water system,126 but they were still in the talking stage five
years later.
127 In 1888 the Raleigh Water Works Company supplied
water to public fountains but not to homes.128 The aldermen were
moved by civic pride in 1889 to require the water company to lay
water pipes to houses if enough customers requested such service
so that annual receipts per block amounted to $20.00.
129 More and
more people began to tap the water mains; the stockholders in the
water company were well pleased.130
Just at that juncture, the city
began to discuss owning its own water works in order to lower the
rates and perhaps attract industry. 131 This was done some time later.
In addition to water, a sewerage system was needed. Following
a long period of discussion, an engineer was employed by the alder-men
to prepare General Plans and Specifications for a Complete Sew-erage
System for the City of Raleigh, N. C. 132 The plans were duly
prepared and accepted and bids called for, but all bids were rejected
as being too high.133 The need remained, however, and a year later
a bond issue for sewerage and paving was submitted to the public.
"The Question Is: Shall We Go Forward Or Backward?" "Let us all
vote for Health and for Progress!" was printed in numerous boxes
scattered throughout the entire issue of the Chronicle.1™ On May 10,
1889, the bond issue carried,135 and by July 5 the pipe had been pur-chased.
136 The laying of the pipe cost the city $81,000 of its bond
issue,
137 but was finally completed six months later in January, 1890.138
The News and Observer proudly declared that "no better job can be
pointed to in the South" and congratulated the contractor for using
124 Daily Standard (Raleigh), January 6, 1870, hereinafter cited as Daily Standard.
125 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, February 6, 1880.
^Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, December 9, 1881.
127 News and Observer, January 28, 1886.
^Minutes of the Board of Alderman, January 6, 1888.
129 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, June 10, 1889.
130 News and Observer, January 21, 1890.
131 News and Observer, March 22, 1890.
132 General Plans and Specifications for a Complete Sewerage System for the City
of Raleigh, N. C. Brochure bound with Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, Febru-ary
3, 1888.
133 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, April 27, 1888.
134 State Chronicle, May 3, 1889.
135 State Chronicle, May 10, 1889.
136 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, July 5, 1889.
137 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, July 17, 1889.
^News and Observer, January 11, 1890.
Raleigh—An Example of the "New South"? 281
"home labor."
139 So many householders signed up to be connected
that they had to wait thirty days amid much complaining.140
Complaints about streets and sidewalks were numerous. On Martin
Street in 1870 were "Deep crevices and unsightly channels. . .
." 141
Passengers walking from the railroad station to the main street "are
in danger of falling into gullies and other mishaps," warned the
Weekly Era in 1873.142 Wet grass and weeds bordering the sidewalks
would drench the unwary citizen who was walking to work in the
mornings.143 The first portion of sidewalk to be paved was in front
of the post office, where granite slabs were laid in 1890.144 A certain
J. J. Hall in a letter to the newspaper gave several reasons for the
building of more sidewalks, as such action would "give employment
to many hands, circulate money, add greatly to the comfort of the
people, improve property and beautify our excellent city."
145 The
mayor asked for public reaction to the laying of brick sidewalks on
all the principal streets, with the property owners paying for their
own portions.146 The newspapers did not report the results of this
request.
The aldermen took positive steps to lay out and pave the city
streets, however. In the late 1860's and 1870's, Kemp P. Battle and
his wife "pleasantly explored" the city streets and found many places
needing new streets cut through. When he became an alderman, he
persuaded his colleagues to open up some of these new streets. A
friend said of Battle early one Sunday morning at Christ Episcopal
Church, "See Kemp Battle sitting yonder looking sanctified. He is
studying how he can open up another pew in the church." 147 The
first proposal to macadamize the city streets was made to the alder-men
in 1882,148 but instead the main streets were paved with Belgian
blocks three years later.
149
It was well that this was done, for the
General Assembly of 1884 had facetiously passed a bill to charter a
ferry boat company to run a ferry on Fayetteville Street.
150
It was
finally decided to macadamize other streets and assess property
189 News and Observer, January 16, 1890.
140 News and Observer, February 18, 1890. m Daily Standard, January 3, 1870.
142 Weekly Era (Raleigh), December 18, 1873.
143 News and Observer, June 6, 1890.
144 News and Observer, July 3, 1890.
145 Daily State Chronicle, September 5, 1890.
1M News and Observer, October 5, 1890.
147 William James Battle (ed.), Memories of an Old-Time Tar Heel, by Kemp Plum-mer
Battle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1945), 227.
148 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, February 3, 1882.
149 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, July 3, 1885.
160 State Chronicle, February 2, 1888.
282 The North Carolina Historical Review
owners for the costs.
151 One observer thought the foundation rocks
looked so "formidable" that surely the paving was being done "once
for all time." 152 Many citizens looked forward to being able to drive
their buggies and carriages out to the suburbs on these newly paved
streets.
153 A street sweeper was purchased in October, 1890, to keep
these newly paved masterpieces in the best possible condition.154
At the opening of this period the city streets and most business
establishments were lighted by gas manufactured by Springfield Gas
Machines. 155 Electricity was beginning to be used, however. The first
public building to be lighted with electricity was the deaf, dumb, and
blind institute, where the new lights "illuminate both the buildings
and the grounds most beautifully and effectively."
156 A franchise was
granted to Thompson Houston Electric Light Company to install arc
lights in the city;
157
this was followed by a second such franchise
three years later.
158 When it was pointed out to the aldermen, how-ever,
that two such franchises could not exist simultaneously, the
second was revoked.159 In 1888 Raleigh streets had 100 gas lights
and 20 electric lights which burned all night; the cost to the city was
$3,000 per year.
160 Yet a continuous stream of complaints about the
poor lighting flooded the newspapers as they must have flooded the
aldermen. A strong diatribe appeared in the Raleigh Signal:
Why do we not have a better lighted city? The City of Raleigh is the
worse lighted city of its size in the country. The electric lights, as at present
arranged, are totally inadequate, "to say nothing of their illuminating
power." There ought to be an electric light on every corner, and if we
cannot have that, our City Fathers should go back to the gas lamps, which
afford equally as good lights as the present electric lights, taking into
consideration the fact that we would have more of them.
In the eastern section of our city, is the want of better lights particu-larly
felt. Some of the squares are in total darkness at night. Our citizens
are abundantly taxed and they should at least have a city thoroughly
lighted at night.161
An arbitration commission finally determined that the lights were
actually not as bright as they were guaranteed to be, therefore the
151 News and Observer, June 18, 1890.
152 News and Observer, May 9, 1890.
153 News and Observer, January 12, 1890.
154 North Carolina Intelligencer, October 8, 1890.
155 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, January 2, 1880.
158 News and Observer, January 16, 1886.
157 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, October 14, 1885.
158 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, February 10, 1888.
159 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, February 27, 1888.
160 State Chronicle, March 2, 1888.
161 Raleigh Signal, October 24, 1889.
Raleigh—An Example of the "New South"? 283
city did not have to pay the full amount of the light bill.
162 To cap
the climax, one night the "so-called electric lights" went out eight
times, reported the Chronicle. Even when they were on, "they give
no more light than a good-sized student lamp or seven or eight
tallow candles"; the paper concluded satirically, "What pine-knot
power are the electric lights?" 163 The aldermen purchased sixty new
gas lights,
164 which were installed and resulted in great improvement
in the situation.
165 By 1894, however, most of the problems with the
early electric lights were solved and Raleigh citizens formed an elec-tric
light company, with most of the stock home owned.166 A new
day had dawned.
Public transportation also underwent a revolution. In 1881 four-horse
and two-horse omnibuses plied the city streets on regular
runs.167 By 1890 a number of tracks existed for horse-drawn trolley
cars.
168 The electric cars doomed the horses, however, just as electric
lights replaced gas ones. The first city to install electric cars was
Montgomery, Alabama, in 1886. Asheville in 1889 had the first ones
in North Carolina,169 Winston acquired them in 1890,170 and Raleigh
soon followed suit. In November, 1890, the aldermen decided on six
miles of electric track with overhead wires; this was an extension of
two miles more than already existed for the horse-drawn trolleys.
171
The cars were to run on a seven-minute schedule.172 The final con-tract
was signed with Edison Electric of New York for ten miles of
track,
173 and the first car on Hillsboro Street ran in September, 1891.174
The city was taking on a modern appearance and tempo.
The fire department was probably as good as, if not better than,
that of other comparable cities, in spite of certain peculiarities such
as the installation of a new fire alarm box downtown; the keys to the
box were kept in three neighboring stores.
175 There were eighteen
alarm boxes installed in residential areas; keys were always kept in
162 News and Observer, May 8, 1890.
103 Daily State Chronicle, June 28, 1890.
16i News and Observer, November 15, 1890.
105 North Carolina Intelligencer, January 7, 1891.
106 News and Observer, August 24, 1899.
167 A tax was levied on these. Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, August 5, 1881.
168 News and Observer, July 19, 1890.
169 John Anderson Miller, Fares Please: From Horse-Cars to Streamliners (New
York: Appleton-Century, 1941), Chapter 3, passim.
170 News and Observer, August 12, 1890.
171 News and Observer, November 19, 1890.
172 News and Observer, November 25, 1890.
173 News and Observer, December 21, 1890.
174 State Chronicle, September 3, 1891.
175 News and Observer, March 18, 1890.
284 The North Carolina Historical Review
one of the homes.176
Justification for belief that the protection was
probably quite good is shown by the number of contests in which
the various hose or reel companies won honors. For example, at the
state contest at Charlotte in 1890, the Raleigh Capital Hose Company
kept a previously-won gold medal.177 The equipment was kept up to
date, with a "magnificent, shiny, glossy, brand new, red and blue light
service city hook and ladder truck" being purchased at one time and
horses being mentioned several times as new purchases.178 Items of
praise for quick work were noted in the newspapers.179
Attention was given to the care of public buildings. At the city post
office, 231 new boxes were installed in April, 1890,180 and in June a
"new, nobby and pretty little general delivery window" was in-stalled.
181 The public auditorium, Metropolitan Hall, was improved
by the installation of water closets in the dressing rooms and a freight
elevator for scenery and luggage.182 The jail received a new brick
kitchen and a fresh coat of paint on the fence in 1886,183 but by 1890
it needed to be "somewhat sweetened up" again.184 A new railroad
depot was badly needed, according to all reports, and the city was
anxious to build one, partly as an inducement to the Atlantic Coast
Line to come into Raleigh. 185 Although the Atlantic Coast Line did
not do so, a $75,000 depot was built.
186
The public park movement which spread in the 1890V87 did not
find Raleigh lagging. Two city parks had already been established
by that time; Pullen Park was dedicated to driving and picnicking,
with a pavilion and a pond with fifty goldfish for entertainment; and
Brookside Park which could be reached by streetcar included swim-ming
and baseball areas as well as picnic grounds.188
Beginning in 1890 the city underwent a period of expansion from
its previous narrow limits into suburban developments. Three land
promotion companies began residential developments in that year,
among the leaders being many of the same men who had promoted
176 News and Observer, April 1, 1890.
177 News and Observer, May 22, 1890.
178 News and Observer, July 1, September 6, 1890.
179 News and Observer, December 29, 31, 1889.
im News and Observer, April 12, 1890.
181 News and Observer, June 22, 1890.
™2 News and Observer, January 17, May 13, 1890.
183 News and Observer, January 23, 1886.
184 News and Observer, April 22, 1890.
185 News and Observer, February 19, 1890.
188 North Carolina Intelligencer, October 1, 1890.
187 Harvey Wish, Society and Thought in Modern America, Volume II of Society and
Thought in America (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 2 volumes, 1952), 281.
188 News and Observer, May 17, July 20, 1890.
Raleigh—An Example of the "New South"? 285
the cotton factory as well as newspaper editor Josephus Daniels. In
September Daniels called for "the organization of a strong and vigor-ous
land and improvement company" as "about the only thing the
town is behind in now." 189 In November he was a stockholder in such
a company.190 Of course the city long ago outgrew the suburbs of the
1890's.
Since the days of Walter Hines Page, Raleigh had become imbued
with the spirit of the New South. Gone was the old lethargy, gone
were the red clay streets. Citizens pointed with pride to their prog-ress
and their hopeful future. The list of new enterprises was indeed
a long and creditable one, although one must always remember
that most of them were small in size. Raleigh never became a Bir-mingham
or an Atlanta in spite of all that some of its promoters
could do. Yet Captain Ashe could justifiably say that Raleigh "grows
steadily and surely adds strength and accumulates vigor, and, like
the well built clipper ship, spreads her sails to favoring breezes and
passes on to certain success." 191 James A. Weston of Hickory could
say to Captain Ashe, "Inter nos, I always put Raleigh a little ahead of
any other place." 192 Mayor A. A. Thompson could congratulate the
aldermen on "the great progress made by the city during the past
two years, the improvements made and those projected, the excellent
financial condition of the city and . . . the hope that the advancement
of the city in all respects would be still more marked in the future." 193
And while Jo6ephus Daniels stretched the truth when he declared
that the population of Raleigh in 1891 was over 18,000, he could
truthfully say that "Raleigh is blessed with a past, a present, and a
future that is exceedingly gratifying and bright." 194
In conclusion, Raleigh appears to have possessed a fair share of the
New South's spirit of reconciliation with the North. It had a crusading
newspaper editor in the person of Daniels and a few enthusiastic
industry hunters such as Colonel Primrose and Major Tucker. It en-dorsed
public elementary education and tried to modernize the
appearance of the city. Raleigh was, then, a reasonably good example
of the New South even though it was not in the mainstream of devel-opment.
It remains to be seen whether additional studies of other
fringe communities will result in similar conclusions.
M
188 Daily State Chronicle, September 2, 1890.
190 The Raleigh Land and Improvement Company, Daily State Chronicle, Novem-ber
9, 1890. The same issue announced the West Side Land Company while the North
Side Land Company was reported in the Daily Evening Visitor, December 2, 1890.
191 News and Observer, October 16, 1890.
182 James A. Weston to Samuel A. Ashe, September 5, 1889, Ashe Papers.
198 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, May 7, 1889.
194 State Chronicle, September 9, 1891.
A CARPETBAGGER'S CONVERSION TO
WHITE SUPREMACY
By Wilton B. Fowler*
At Chester, South Carolina, in August, 1870, the carpetbag attor-ney
general of the state excoriated his "fair-headed, blue-eyed Saxon"
audience for refusing to accept the equality of Negroes and instead
"sneering at every breath at the ignorance of those whom you and
you alone have made ignorant." * The same man, Daniel Henry Cham-berlain,
thirty-four years later—long after Negro political power had
withered in South Carolina—appeared as a "hearty supporter of the
mass of the Southern whites in their relations to the negro." Con-fessing
his own physical repulsion at the Negro race, he considered
the goal of social or political equality for the Negro an impossibility
"within any measurable range of time, if ever." 2
This was a dramatic change in heart by a man whose experience
in Reconstruction lent authority to his opinions. And since he did not
keep his opinions to himself, it is likely that he influenced some of
the Americans who around the turn of the century concerned them-selves
with the Negro's situation. A survey of his expressed thoughts
reveals the stages of the metamorphosis of a champion of equality
into a racist.
The young Chamberlains attitudes took shape in the morally agi-tated
environs of Worcester County, Massachusetts, where he was
born in 1835. As a student and tutor in the Worcester High School
during the 1850's he became an advocate of emancipation and dab-bled
in the movement for women's rights. The teachings of Charles
Sumner, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips impressed
him deeply. He later recalled that he had heard Phillips speak no
less than fifty times. It was Phillips' style of oratory that Chamberlain
imitated as a student politician at Yale College.3 Elected valedictory
* Mr. Fowler is an instructor in history at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
1 D. H. Chamberlain, Speech at the Mass Meeting in Chester, S.C., August 19, 1870
(Charleston: Privately printed, 1870), 4.
2 D. H. Chamberlain, Present Phases of Our So-Called Negro Problem. Open Letter
to the Right Honorable James Bryce, M.P., of England (Charleston: Privately printed,
1904), 6-7, 27, hereinafter cited as Chamberlain, Our So-Called Negro Problem.
3 James Green, Personal Recollections of Daniel Henry Chamberlain (Worcester:
Davis & Banister, 1908), 3-6, hereinafter cited as Green, Personal Recollections;
A Carpetbagger's Conversion to White Supremacy 287
speaker for his class (1862), he addressed his fellows on the obliga-tions
of the "Scholar in the Republic." A paramount duty, he urged,
awaited the educated man in public office. Politicians were the ones
who had to deliver the country from the evil of slavery, and in such
an undertaking zeal alone would not suffice: ". . . in this age, and
especially in this country, we need not more activity but more wis-dom
in all the relations and departments of civil and public life."
4
From Yale Chamberlain, still borrowing money for tuition, moved
on to the Harvard Law School, resisting until the beginning of 1864
the temptation to go to war. To friends who told him he could do no
more in the army than someone less educated, Chamberlain replied
that if he did not enlist, "years hence I shall be ashamed to have it
known that for any reason I did not bear a hand in this life-or-death
struggle for the Union and for Freedom." Governor John Albion
Andrew gave him a lieutenancy in the predominantly Negro Fifth
Massachusetts Cavalry, which saw duty in Virginia.5
Shortly after returning to Massachusetts at the end of the war,
Chamberlain journeyed south to settle the affairs of a deceased class-mate,
James P. Blake, who had left New Haven, Connecticut, to
practice law at Charleston. Once in South Carolina, Chamberlain
sought to improve his fortune by planting cotton on Wadmalaw
Island. He also took a retainer to prosecute claims in New Orleans
for "someone who had been stripped of his property in cotton by
government seizure." The planting did not pay, but legal practice
did—to the extent of enabling him to repay the more than $2,000
owed on his education.6
In the fall of 1867 Chamberlain won election to the South Carolina
constitutional convention, where he insisted that all public schools
be racially integrated. From 1868 to 1872 he held the elective office
of state attorney general. Little is known of his life during this period,
except that he opposed repudiation of the state debt, married Alice
Ingersoll of Maine, and formed a law partnership with Samuel W.
Melton, a native Carolinian whom people "thoroughly and rightly
Walter Allen, Governor Chamberlain's Administration in South Carolina (New York:
G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1888), 524-526, hereinafter cited as Allen, Chamberlain's Ad-ministration;
William Lloyd Garrison to D. H. Chamberlain, October 16, 1876, quoted
in Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 402.
4 D. H. Chamberlain, The Scholar in the Republic: Valedictory Oration, Class of
1862, Yale College, June 25, 1862 (New Haven: Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor, 1862),
22.
5 Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 525.
6 Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 526; Green, Personal Recollections, 8. Cham-berlain
described the handling of Blake's affairs in a letter to Eli Whitney Blake,
January 27, 1867, Blake Family Collection, Yale University Library, New Haven,
Connecticut.
288 The North Carolina Historical Review
trusted." 7 In 1870 the attorney general admitted that "excesses and
crimes . . . have disgraced our State since the close of the war," but
stanchly defended the Radical administration as the protector of the
Negro. It was especially commendable, he thought, that Negroes had
not taken revenge on the white minority, which had persistently
opposed the elevation and enfranchisement of the freedmen. Against
the contention that Radicals were spendthrifty and corrupt, he ex-hibited
a list of new services provided by the state to a citizenry
more than double that of 1860 because of the inclusion of Negroes.
At any rate, he argued, the "debt which this State, its property and
its present intelligence, owes to the colored race, to all her unedu-cated
children, can never be fully discharged." 8
From 1872 through 1874 Chamberlain occupied no public office.
He did, however, sit on the board of trustees which integrated the
University of South Carolina. When several faculty members re-signed
because of the admission of a Negro ( who happened to be the
secretary of state), Chamberlain drafted the resolution accepting
their resignations and welcoming the removal of their racist influence,
"so hostile to the welfare of our State." By 1877 the university, which
he called "the common property of all our citizens without distinction
of race," had a predominantly Negro student body.9
At the same time that he pursued advancement for the Negro,
Chamberlain sympathized with the complaints of white property
owners against wasteful government. As owner of stock in a printing
firm, as the "leading attorney" for some New York bankers, and as a
holder of state bonds, he was something of a propertied man himself.
At the Taxpayers' Convention called by Conservatives in Columbia
in 1871, Chamberlain was selected as an official, spoke out for econ-omy
in government, and recommended proportional representation
as a check on the influence of the ignorant and propertyless. That
he hoodwinked the convention or that he stole from public funds,
often alleged, was not proved. He flatly denied all charges of dis-
7 John S. Reynolds, Reconstruction in South Carolina, 1865-1877 (Columbia: State
Co., Publishers, 1905), 507, hereinafter cited as Reynolds, Reconstruction', Allen,
Chamberlain's Administration, 6-9; Green, Personal Recollections, 11; Francis Butler
Simkins and Robert Hilliard Woody, South Carolina During Reconstruction (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1932), 127, hereinafter cited as Simkins
and Woody, South Carolina During Reconstruction-, Edward J. Maxwell, "Hampton's
Campaign in South Carolina, I," South-Atlantic, I (February, 1878), 329-330.
e D. H. Chamberlain, Speech in Columbia, S.C., October U, 1870 (n.p., n.d.), 1, 4,
12, 14.
9 Daniel Walker Hollis, "Robert W. Barnwell," South Carolina Historical Magazine,
LVI (July, 1955), 136-137.
A Carpetbagger's Conversion to White Supremacy 289
honesty or deception,10 and in 1878 he "manifested the greatest
willingness" to stand trial under a Redeemer indictment (dismissed
inl881).n
In 1874 Chamberlain ran as the Republican candidate for governor
on a platform of reform. Because he promised a program of re-trenched
spending and honest administration, the Democrats did not
offer an opponent, and an "Independent" aspirant was beaten by a
vote of 80,403 to 68,814.12 Chamberlain's inaugural claimed honesty
and economy to be his paramount concerns. His ultimate goal, how-ever,
was "nothing less than the reestablishment of society in this
State upon the foundation of absolute equality of civil and political
rights."
13 Nothing here, or in his subsequent achievement of a public
accommodations act (prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race
or color), indicated those unspecified "tendencies toward his later
conversion to white supremacy" which one scholar detected in Cham-berlain
as governor.14
Conservative opinion of the Chamberlain regime was at first cau-tious,
then enthusiastic. The Charleston News and Courier congratu-lated
the Governor for not forsaking his campaign pledges, as
Conservatives thought he would, and promised to co-operate in his
program of good government. By April, after Chamberlain had vetoed
a tax increase and a bill to liquidate allegedly fraudulent state debts,
the paper predicted that his performance, if continued, would mark
him in history as the "saviour of South Carolina." Nor had he lost
the support of Negroes. One spokesman, Richard T. Greener, felt,
after first suspecting a "sellout" to the Conservatives, that Chamber-lain's
actions had operated "to shut the mouths of the insincere Con-servatives
and assure the honest grumblers." 15
With favorable comment from the state's press and accolades from
the Charleston Chamber of Commerce, the Governor continued his
attempt at political co-operation between Negroes and white busi-nessmen.
But late in 1875 his party undermined his program. While
he was away from the capital, Republican legislators elected to judge-ships
two men with reputations of notorious corruption, W. J. Whip-
10 Simkins and Woody, South Carolina During Reconstruction, 156-164, 181n, 203-
204; Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 143-145, 491-501.
11 David Duncan Wallace, South Carolina: A Short History, 1520-19US (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 1961), 595, hereinafter cited as Wallace, South
Carolina.
13 Simkins and Woody, South Carolina During Reconstruction, 473.
"Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 11, 28.
"Reynolds, Reconstruction, 291; George B. Tindall, South Carolina Negroes, 1877-
1900 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952), 11.
15 Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 111-113.
290 The North Carolina Historical Review
per, a Negro, and F. J. Moses, Jr., the preceding Governor. Conserv-atives
were indignant, and Chamberlain, obviously to discipline
Republicans, predicted the revitalization of the Democratic party.
He refused to endorse the commissions of the judge-elects, thereby
gaining the gratitude of some whites, who held rallies throughout
the state in his support.16
A short time later the Governor wired an ambiguous appeal to the
annual meeting of the New England Society of Charleston:
The civilization of the Puritan and the Cavalier, of the Roundhead and
the Huguenot, is in peril. Courage, Determination, Union, Victory, must
be our watchwords. The grim Puritans never quailed under threat or blow.
Let their sons now imitate their example
!
17
What constituted the "peril" he did not specify, but clearly he feared
what he had fought to prevent, a political polarization along a racial
line. The legislature by choosing Whipper and Moses seemed to
repudiate the policy of good government with which Chamberlain
attracted white voters. Now many of the latter looked more favorably
on General Martin W. Gary's "Mississippi plan" for intimidating
Negroes into either voting Democratic or abstaining. Gary's followers,
preparing for the biennial elections, so intimidated Negroes by April,
1876, that Chamberlain warned he would ask for federal protection
for them. After the May lynching of six Negroes in Edgefield ( Gary's
home county), he advised President Ulysses S. Grant to be prepared
to send in troops. He again alerted Grant in July following the Ham-burg
riot, which he described as "a darker picture of human cruelty
than the slaughter of Custer and his soldiers." On into the fall the
Governor risked white votes by condemning Democratic terrorists.
However enthusiastic their support of his financial policies, most
whites deserted Chamberlain because of his insistence on racial equal-ity.
18
At the peak of the gubernatorial race, Chamberlain was in physical
danger. He seemed unmoved, however, by the shuffles, insults, and
threats from Democratic ruffians—often armed.19 Responding to the
16 Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 157, 195-198.
17 Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 201.
18 Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 307-313; Reynolds, Reconstruction, 346;
Wallace, South Carolina, 594; Hampton M. Jarrell, Wade Hampton and the Negro
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1949), 49-50, accuses Chamberlain
of using the Hamburg riot for political purposes.
19 Regarding Chamberlain's courage in confronting armed hecklers, see W. W. Ball,
A Boy's Recollection of the Red Shirt Campaign of 1876 in South Carolina (Colum-bia:
State Co., Printers, 1911), 14.
A Carpetbagger's Conversion to White Supremacy 291
News and Couriers invitation to ditch the Republican campaign and
work for General Wade Hampton's election, he chided the news-paper
for having yielded to the brutal and bloodthirsty "spirit of
Edgefield." Later the Democratic party chairman attacked the Gov-ernor
for not calling upon the white party to help suppress the
terrorism which was accompanying the electioneering. Chamberlain's
reply did not show deference to Democratic sensibilities:
To entrust the protection of those who are today endangered by the
present disturbances of the armed, mounted, unlawful, Democratic Rifle
Clubs would, in my sober judgment, be as unnatural and unfaithful in me
as to set kites to watch doves, or wolves to guard sheep.20
Grant sent troops to guard the polls during the election, during
which enough frauds occurred to make the outcome contestable.
Negroes did vote, however, and almost all counties with preponder-antly
Negro populations returned majorities for Chamberlain. Ac-cording
to the Republican tally, Chamberlain won by 86,216 to
83,071 votes.
21
Without military protection Negroes probably would not have
risked white enmity by voting for Chamberlain. When federal
troops were withdrawn in April, 1877, as a result of President Ruther-ford
B. Hayes' "Compromise of 1877," Chamberlain surrendered his
office to Hampton. In January Chamberlain's wife had nervously
written to William Lloyd Garrison her fear that blood would flow
before the contest for the governorship ended. But in an orderly
transition, Chamberlain graciously exchanged correspondence with
Hampton and took leave of South Carolina after explaining to his
followers that they had been betrayed by Hayes. Negroes were, he
declared, victims of a new political doctrine which required that a
majority unable to maintain its position by physical force had to
submit to political servitude.
22 Privately he wrote:
I see no present hope for the colored race here. It would have been better
if they had never had the ballot. Poor race, I could wish they could make
their flight to some other land, even if it were beyond the reach of the
white man's civilization. Horace Mann is said to have remarked in his
last days that the trouble with him had been that "he was in a hurry but
God was not." 23
20 Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 361-363, 387.
21 Reynolds, Reconstruction, 393-394; Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 444.
22 Alice I. Chamberlain to William Lloyd Garrison, December 26, 1876, William
Lloyd Garrison Papers, Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts, hereinafter
cited as Garrison Papers; Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 480-483.
23 D. H. Chamberlain to Francis J. Garrison, April 8, 1877, Garrison Papers.
292 The North Carolina Historical Review
From Columbia Chamberlain proceeded to New York City and to
senior rank in the law firm of Chamberlain, Carter, and Eaton. Still
a Republican, he resisted blandishments from Hayes, expressed
"pride and satisfaction" in his record, and continued to support Negro
rights. In a letter to William Lloyd Garrison he charged that South-ern
Republicans had been sold in
as distinct a bargain as ever existed which was not signed and sealed on
paper. And the South is not to be blamed . . . but rather those leaders,
like Evarts, who could never see their Constitutional obligations towards
the South till the offices were slipping away from their party.24
Those newly discovered constitutional obligations, necessitating the
withdrawal of troops from South Carolina, meant to Chamberlain
that his defeat was inevitable, for "the uneducated negro was too
weak, no matter what his numbers, to cope with the whites." 25
In a July 4, 1877, speech at Woodstock, Connecticut, the former
Governor drew considerable but not unanimous applause for his
denunciation of Hayes. The President's policy had, he said, per-mitted
the
abandonment of Southern Republicans and especially the colored race, to
the control and rule not only of the Democratic party, but of that class
at the South which regarded slavery as a Divine institution, which waged
four years of destructive war for its perpetuation, which steadily opposed
citizenship and suffrage for the negro—in a word, a class whose traditions,
principles and history are opposed to every step and feature of what
Republicans call our national progress since I860.26
Nor had Hayes been correct in invoking state rights to cover his
action. The question was not one primarily of state or national rights,
but rather one of national duty as expressed in Section Four of Article
Four of the Constitution.27
Chamberlain did not persist in a campaign against Hayes, as a
zealot of Garrisonian stamp might have. One of his listeners at Wood-
24 D. H. Chamberlain to William Lloyd Garrison, June 11, 1877, quoted in Allen,
Chamberlain's Administration, 504-505.
25 D. H. Chamberlain to William Lloyd Garrison, June 11, 1877, quoted in Allen,
Chamberlain's Administration, 504-505. On April 11, 1880, President Hayes wrote
in his diary: "I am not aware of a single instance in which a conspicuous Republican
of the South can be said to have been abandoned. Gov Chamberlain alone has not
received office, and he placed himself in an attitude of antagonism which precluded
it." T. Harry Williams (ed.), Hayes: The Diary of a President, 1875-1881 (New
York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1964), 270.
™New York Tribune, July 5, 1877.
27 New York Tribune, July 5, 1877.
A Carpetbagger's Conversion to White Supremacy 293
stock indicated the mood of northern people by rising at the end of
the speech and complaining that Chamberlain s views were unrep-resentative
of New England Republicans, who were in full sympathy
with the President.28 In private correspondence the next week Cham-berlain
agreed that it was desirable to have the "Southern question
settled and put aside, but it cannot be until justice is done—to all
alike."
29 Then for months he let the issue lie.
How much longer did Chamberlain advocate Negro rights?
The February, 1879, issue of the North American Review con-tained
his next statement on the matter. The article, "Reconstruction
and the Negro," like all his essays felicitously written, represented
the mature opinion of a reflective man. Beginning his argument on
the premise that the Negro's position had been the leading question
in politics for four decades, Chamberlain asserted that the two forces
which otherwise would have determined political ends—commerce
and empire—hated the race issue and wished to take the nation's
attention off it. Now that white rule, upon the demand of "business
and the desire for a formal national unity," was restored in the South,
people were asking whether universal suffrage had been a mistake.30
Conceding that Reconstruction failed to achieve complete success,
but also declaring that the present condition of the colored race was
intolerable, Chamberlain addressed himself to the charges that (1)
it was cruel to subject white people to Negro rule and (2) enfran-chisement
of the Negro had gone against nature by replacing "intelli-gence
and capacity" with "ignorance and inexperience." To the first
charge he replied that universal suffrage had not caused subjection
of the white race to Negro rule. The "sole cause" of the political
supremacy of the Negroes "was the willful and deliberate refusal of
the white race to contribute its proper and natural influence to the
practical work of government." As for the second charge, far from
violating any natural law, enfranchisement "was the dictate and ex-pression
of the highest morality applied to the affairs of government,
the recognition and protection of the natural and inalienable rights
of all men—the opportunity, without artificial shackles or hindrances,
to run the race of life."
31
Progress in reform in South Carolina, he continued, had compelled
28 New York Tribune, July 5, 1877.
29 D. H. Chamberlain to [?], July 9, 1877, Betts Collection, Yale University Library.
30 D. H. Chamberlain, "Reconstruction and the Negro," North American Review,
CXVIII (February, 1879), 161, hereinafter cited as Chamberlain, "Reconstruction
and the Negro."
31 Chamberlain, "Reconstruction and the Negro," 162-167.
294 The North Carolina Historical Review
acknowledgment even by many of those opposed to Negro suffrage
that the best assurance for future good government lay with the
Republican party. White supremacy came about only after "delib-erate,
organized violence in all its forms, supplemented and crowned
by the most daring and stupendous election frauds." All this was
presently being excused by the argument that the inability of a
people to cope physically and economically with its enemies was
proof that the people was not entitled to retain its political power.
To Chamberlain, "Such conclusions are as illogical as they are
immoral." 32
Again in 1880 the former Governor defended Negro rights and
related them to the moral issue of honest government. To President-elect
James A. Garfield he wrote that the treatment of the Negro in
the South was a "great national issue." But it was not worth Repub-licans'
time to attempt a restoration of suffrage unless incorruptible
appointees and candidates served the party in the South. The whites
of South Carolina, he said, "could never have been persuaded to
oppose my re-election but for the acts of a Republican Legislature,
in denying to them decent government and officers." Garfield invited
additional comments, and in his second letter Chamberlain offered
a warning that because free suffrage was prostrate, "all our great
national interests, economical and moral" were endangered. Many
Republicans were ready to compensate for the loss of Negro votes by
aiding "anybody at the South who breaks with the regular Democ-racy,
regardless of the merits of his cause." In Chamberlain's opinion,
Republicans by countenancing state debt repudiation movements,
like William Mahone's in Virginia, were dishonoring the party.33
Unfortunately, Garfield, who agreed with Chamberlain's observa-tions,
soon died and was succeeded by Chester A. Arthur, who co-operated
closely with Mahone and his Readjustors.34 In September,
1883, Chamberlain mourned the decline of "political morality and
public integrity," as evidenced by Mahone's success. The Readjustor
program, designed to renounce justly contracted public debts, was
patently immoral, nothing more than a fraud, so Chamberlain
thought. He perceived that Arthur was attempting to foster Repub-licanism
by dropping Negro-dominated factions for discontented
32 Chamberlain, "Reconstruction and the Negro," 170-172.
33 D. H. Chamberlain to James A. Garfield, December 28, 1880, in D. H. Chamberlain,
Political Letters, 1883 (n.p., n.d.), 19-24, hereinafter cited as Chamberlain, Political
Letters.
34 Stanley P. Hirshson, Farewell to the Bloody Shirt (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-sity
Press, 1962), 96, hereinafter cited as Hirshson, Farewell to the Bloody Shirt.
A Carpetbagger's Conversion to White Supremacy 295
white Democrats.35 Southern Republicans were again being betrayed,
this time in deference to the fiscally dishonest.
By 1884 Chamberlain was so disappointed in the Republican party
that he, along with numerous others, bolted the party and supported
Grover Cleveland for President. The change, he felt, was the party's,
not his. "The Republican party was never entitled to claim our sup-port,
except for the correctness of its principles and the fitness of its
candidates." 36 Never again a member of a party and distrustful of
politicians, Chamberlain leaned more and more toward the concepts
of laissez faire and state rights in his view of governmental responsi-bilities.
He felt that it was better to leave in private and local hands
the governance of society than to entrust it to party spoilsmen.
At Yale in 1887 he told members of Phi Beta Kappa that the North
had enough problems without tackling those of the South, which had
experienced "no race conflicts nearly as dangerous, stubborn or in-jurious
to combatants or communities as the conflicts which have
marked the North during the last year." In the same speech he con-demned
the Blair Bill, which proposed federal appropriation of money
for education, to be distributed to the states in proportion to their
illiteracy. The bill, said Chamberlain, smacked of federal supervision,
presenting the "gravest constitutional and practical questions." For
testing the acceptability of this and any similar legislation, he pre-sented
his listeners a rule of thumb: "In construing the Constitution,
the question is never, Is the power denied?' but, Is it granted?'
"
3T
He thought the Blair Bill failed this test and also the practical
requirement of necessity, because the poverty of the South was a
thing of the past. The southern states "not only now generally raise
as much money for public education by State taxes as the Northern,
but, in general, the public schools of the South are nearly as well
attended and as efficient as those of the North." Though much re-mained
to be done for educating the Negro, time, not federal money,
was the chief requirement. No approach to the problem was "so un-reasonable,
as well as unphilosophical, as a certain feeling ... of
over-haste and impatience to solve the problem at once and off-hand."
38
35 D. H. Chamberlain to John T. Dezendorf, September 17, 1883, in Chamberlain,
Political Letters, 9-13 ; Hirshson, Farewell to the Bloody Shirt, 106.
36 D. H. Chamberlain, "A Calm View of the Election," Independent, XXXVI
(November 13, 1884), 4.
37 D. H. Chamberlain, Education at the South. Address of D. H. Chamberlain, of
New York, before the Yale Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa, at Linonia Hall, New
Haven, Conn., February 9, 1887 (New York: Evening Post, 1887), 8, 16, hereinafter
cited as Chamberlain, Education at the South.
38 Chamberlain, Education at the South, 41-42.
296 The North Carolina Historical Review
Chamberlain had become an exponent of evolution. Later in the
year he identified "such men as Sir Henry Maine and Charles Darwin
as the discoverers, in a genuine sense, of new worlds—vast illimitable
domains of knowledge and wisdom." They had articulated a "law of
all natural existence," which explained the inexplicable and disclosed
"new lines and sure prophecies of advance not before dreamed of."
It was now obvious to him that reform had to be slow because prog-ress
was cumulative, stacking each new advance on the authority of
precedent. With John Ruskin he now saw
the work of living men not superseding, but building upon, the work of
the past ; all growing together into one mighty temple ; the rough stones
and the smooth all finding their place, and rising, day by day, in richer and
higher pinnacles to Heaven.39
Interpreting history as progressive in the long run, Chamberlain
could place the Negro problem in broader perspective. He reminded
Charleston sons of New England that both the Pilgrims and Hugue-nots
experienced the "austere glory of suffering" as well as the "inspir-ing
hope of triumph." Contemporary South Carolinians had to be
patient with their peculiar problem and base their hopes on the safe-guarding
of popular liberty. Thereby, at some unstated time, would
be attained the goal of "perfect freedom for all who hear God's image"
—presumably including descendants of non-Pilgrims, non-Huguenots,
and Negroes.40
Examining "The Race Problem at the South" in 1890, Chamberlain
asked whether, in view of the widespread suppression of the Negro
vote, the federal government or northern states had any duty to per-form
or right to assert. "My first answer," he wrote, "is that I do not
think any people which is free to help itself and does not, ought to
have help from others. The negro has been helped as no race was
ever helped before. He was set free by others, not by his own efforts
. . . and enfranchised by no efforts of his own." Secondly, the federal
government possessed no constitutional way to aid the Negro. The
Supreme Court's decision in 1883 on the Civil Rights statute (1875)
correctly made plain the Fourteenth Amendment's exclusive appli-cability
to states, not to individuals. Why was "it that the protection
39 D. H. Chamberlain, "The American System of Trial by Jury," Journal of Social
Science, XXIII (November, 1887), 85-86, 123-124, hereinafter cited as Chamberlain,
"Trial by Jury."
40 D. H. Chamberlain, The Character and Work of the Pilgrims of New England,
Speech at the Annual Dinner of the New England Society of Charleston, S. C, Dec.
23, 1889 (Charleston: E. Perry & Co., 1890), 10.
A Carpetbagger's Conversion to White Supremacy 297
which is sufficient for the white race is thought to be insufficient for
the colored race?" Why were no other groups subjected to the wrongs
of which Negroes complained? It was "because no other race or na-tionality
has the qualities of self-assertion and self-defense to so small
a degree." For this deficiency there was no legal remedy. The con-stitutional
limit of protection of the Negro had been reached.41
Henry Cabot Lodge's "Force Bill" of 1890 for regulating the elec-tion
of congressmen struck Chamberlain as partisan and impracti-cable.
Nearly all everyday interests of the Negro, he argued, lay
outside Congress' jurisdiction. If such were not so, the bill would still
achieve nothing because enforcement would require military coercion.
There seemed to Chamberlain no legal means at all to secure for the
Negro the vote, nor did he "regard the denial of the negro's or a
white man's right to vote ... as an occasion warranting the least
departure from our approved authoritative standards of constitutional
construction." After all, the colored people were "no longer 'the wards
of the nation.' They are an integral part of the great body of our peo-ple,
and new laws or attempts at new laws for the special advantage
or protection of that race are out of date, impossible, and mis-chievous."
42
Beyond the realm of laws and constitutions, beyond theories, which
he distrusted, and out of the lessons of actual experience, Chamber-lain
discovered a "sense ... in which votes are weighed and not
counted." When control of society was the question, as in South
Carolina in 1876, and in similar crises, "we shall find," he said,
that men cannot always be counted by polls, that men in these last resorts
must be weighed, that brains have weight, that blood tells, that exper-ience
is strength, that ancestry and history count, that race pride is a factor
of untold power, that a servile legacy is a legacy and condition which no
executive proclamation, no constitutional amendment can change or
remove.43
This empirical finding by Chamberlain, in which a contrary reader
might have discerned the outlines of a racial theory of history, led
him to conclude:
It is not good for the black race, not good probably for any race, to exer-cise
power or to stand in places of responsibility for which they are
41 D. H. Chamberlain, "The Race Problem at the South," New Englander and Yale
Review, XVI (June, 1890), 509, 512-516, hereinafter cited as Chamberlain, "The Race
Problem."
42 Chamberlain, "The Race Problem," 520-523, 511.
43 Chamberlain, "The Race Problem," 510-511.
298 The North Carolina Historical Review
unfitted or unequal. The rule of the numerical majority at the South from
1867 to 1876, wherever it prevailed, resulted in intolerable misgovern-ment.
44
In thirteen years the carpetbag Governor had become an eloquent
critic of his own government. The old reform days did retain, how-ever,
at least a sentimental attraction. In an 1892 attack on the Repub-lican
party for its stand on the tariff, which he considered the leading
issue of that year's presidential campaign, Chamberlain lamented
that the "great party of the war for the Union, of emancipation, the
party of Lincoln and Sumner," had "sold itself . . . unreservedly to
tariff beneficiaries and monopolists." His attitude toward government
protection of business, through tariffs or other means, paralleled his
attitude on government protection of Negroes: "The limit of the
rightful power of free government is the security of individual action
and effort. Any tariff . . . which does in fact favor or protect some
interests and not others is an evil, a violation of the principle of free-dom
and equality of rights and privileges." 45
Last in importance as an issue in 1892, Chamberlain announced,
was the "Force Bill." The country would never tolerate such a law
because it had only one purpose, the perpetuation of party power.
The South must be left to work out its own problems. If evils exist there
the only agencies competent to deal with them are the communities them-selves
most affected by such evils. If in some localities even a majority of
the voters cannot vote freely or safely, the evil must be left to be dealt with
by the voters who are concerned. No majority of voters in any American
community, when it becomes intelligent, responsible and experience [d]
in the use of the ballot, can be disfranchised by the minority. If the present
minority represents the vast preponderance of the intelligence, the prop-erty,
and the civil experience of those communities, how futile, how mis-chievous,
how unpatriotic to seek by outside agencies to give effect and
power to a mere numerical majority!46
By 1896 individual liberty meant for Chamberlain not the promo-tion
of political equality, as it had twenty years earlier, but the right
to save oneself from the rising tide of equality. He told the graduating
class at Northwestern University that he did not completely reject the
idea that all men are created equal. "But the truth has now dawned
on all clear-sighted men; it will shine more and more unto the perfect
44 Chamberlain, "The Race Problem," 510-511.
45 D. H. Chamberlain, The Political Issues of 1892, Speech at the Academy of Music,
Philadelphia, October 28, 1892 (New York: Albert B. King, 1892 [?]), 8-9, 14, herein-after
cited as Chamberlain, Political Issues.
40 Chamberlain, Political Issues, 35, 39.
A Carpetbagger's Conversion to White Supremacy 299
day;—that freedom as a fact, as a practical thing, is never, and never
can be, absolute." Under conditions of democracy, full suffrage, and
the idea of equality, broad inroads were being made into the old and
inherited domain of individual freedom. If the southern Negro was
a victim of thralldom, he was no worse off than the citizens of New
York, who suffered the tyranny "of the mob, the populace, the prole-tariat,
or the so-called organized forces of labor, the armies led by our
Debs, our Gompers, and our Powderly." Better conditions for both the
North and South would come only when the immigrants in the former
and the Negroes in the latter section acquired the Anglo-Saxon gen-ius
for self-government.47
To historians, Chamberlain's best-known statement on the Negro
and Reconstruction has been the one appearing in Atlantic Monthly
for April, 1901. There he wrote of the blindness of partisan zeal as
expressed by Radicals in congressional debates. Sounding like a man
who felt he had been used for base purposes, he saw that the primary
objective of the Republican party had been "to secure party ascend-ency
and control at the South and in the nation through the negro
vote." South Carolina whites had bowed to Radical domination in
1867 because they were stunned and adrift without a leader of John
C. Calhoun's stature. Even had they possessed competent leaders
willing to participate in a mixed government, the whites would have
been alienated from the Negroes.
It cannot be too confidently asserted that from 1867 to 1872 nothing would
have been more unwelcome to the leaders of reconstruction at Washington
than the knowledge that the whites of South Carolina were gaining in-fluence
over the blacks, or were helping to make laws, or were holding of-fice.
The writer knows his ground here; and there is available written
evidence in abundance to avouch all his statements and opinions,—evi-dence,
too, which will sometime be given to the world.48
At last provoked beyond endurance, South Carolina whites in 1876,
believing their choice was "between violence and lawlessness for a
time, and misrule for all time," chose the former. So had "people of
force, pride, and intelligence" ever done.49
As for the Negro in the year 1901, his welfare, according to Cham-
47 D. H. Chamberlain, Limitations of Freedom, An Address Delivered before the
Northwestern University, at its Commencement, at Chicago, June 11, 1896 (n.p.,
n.d.), 9-10, 20.
48 D. H. Chamberlain, "Reconstruction in South Carolina," Atlantic Monthly,
LXXXVII (April, 1901), 473-476, hereinafter cited as Chamberlain, "Reconstruction
in South Carolina."
49 Chamberlain, "Reconstruction in South Carolina," 481.
300 The North Carolina Historical Review
berlain, lay in the total reversal of "the spirit and policy of recon-struction
which brought on him this Iliad of woes." Through industry
and thrift he could gain all he needed of livelihood and education; any
gratuitous abundance or position would only promote his idleness and
unthrift.
Above all things, let him be taught that his so-called rights depend on
himself alone. Tell him, compel him by iteration to know, that no race
or people has yet long had freedom unless it was won and kept by itself
;
won and kept by courage, by intelligence, by vigilance, by prudence. . . .
Self-government under constitutions presupposes a firm determination, and
mental, moral and physical capacity, ready and equal to the defense of
rights. Neither the negro nor the white man can have them on other
terms.50
In 1904, in ill health and three years from death, Chamberlain was
still turning the Negro question in his mind. A series of letters, to
James Bryce and to newspapers, revealed his conclusions at the end of
a lifetime of inquiry. The lesson he drew from his term as governor
was "that with a preponderating electorate of negroes, it never was
within the bounds of possibility to keep up a bearable government."
There had been nothing strange either in the whites' seizure of govern-ment
or in the Negroes' submission to them. How, after all, could a
people which never lifted a finger against its own enslavement, a con-dition
which Anglo-Saxons would not have tolerated at any cost, have
been expected to demand or retain self-government? 51
Instead of criticizing white southerners, Chamberlain continued, the
northerner of 1904 should extend to them sympathy for their burden,
"greater than was ever before put on white men." Southerners knew
the Negro's limits and governed him and their actions accordingly.
Northerners familiar with the South saw the wisdom of the southern
policy and disabused themselves of the notion that education, "mean-ing
book knowledge, or literary and academic training," would end
the Negro's faults. "The three R's are all the average negro needs.
After that, industrial education, the training of the hand and eye for
work, is all that will help him . . . more than this is positively hurtful."
The "most idle, thriftless, worthless negroes one sees at the South, or
many of them, are what are called well-educated." 52
In a final insight into the race problem, Chamberlain found in the
Negro's own behavior the cause of his difficulties. It was "the nameless
50 Chamberlain, "Reconstruction in South Carolina," 483-484.
51 Chamberlain, Our So-Called Negro Problem, 24, 27.
52 Chamberlain, Our So-Called Negro Problem, 27-31.
A Carpetbagger's Conversion to White Supremacy 301
crime" of rape by Negroes of white women. Ordinarily opposed to
lynching, Chamberlain "came very near to saying" that he did not
blame the South for resorting to lynch law in the case of rape. And
was it not strange that Negro leaders did not realize that this was
the cause of so much racial conflict? When this "crime which first
caused lynchings" was made extinct by the Negroes themselves, all
that would be required to work out the race problem would be for
the whites to employ "the old, tried, commonplace virtues"—humane-ness,
helpfulness, patience—and a "readiness to yield and defend all
the ordinary civil rights." 53
It was of course Chamberlain's experience in South Carolina which
made his later comments on race significant, and it was that experience,
subsequent visits to the state, and correspondence with acquaintances
in the South which he cited as the bases of his conclusions. Given these
bases, there were certain patterns in his intellectual process which so
conditioned what he observed of the Negro as to be themselves of
basic importance. Disdain for the Republican party and bitterness at
the "spirit of party," 54 adoration of the law, insistence on strict con-struction
of federal powers, and confidence in evolution were such
powerful forces in his thought that there is the temptation to believe
that they—not field trips to the South—largely accounted for his re-versal
in opinion.
To understand Chamberlain's separation from the Republican party,
it is helpful to look at him as a member of the national party in the
1860's and 1870's, not just as a carpetbagger. Assuming that he was
an honest man possessing the views of New England Republicans and
recalling that he spoke out for reform in South Carolina as early as
1870, one can see that Chamberlain resembled those reform Repub-licans,
like Carl Schurz and Henry Adams, who bolted the party in
1872. Their failure not being lost on him, he remained to reform the
Republican party in South Carolina from within. After achieving large
success there, he voted at the 1876 national convention on the first
seven ballots for the presidential nomination of General Benjamin H.
Bristow, exposer of the Whisky Ring in Grant's administration.55
Even after Hayes betrayed him, Chamberlain retained some hope
for the party and for Negro suffrage. For a time he tried to persuade
Stalwarts to drive Hayes over "neck, heels, and boots to the Democ-
53 Chamberlain, Our So-Called Negro Problem, 7, 8, 16, 29.
54 Frederic Adams, Daniel Henry Chamberlain, by Frederic Adams; Read before the
Yale Class of 1862, June 25, 1907 (n.p., n.d.), 8, thinks Chamberlain never recovered
physically from the strain of 1877.
55 Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 271; Matthew Josephson, The Politicos,
1865-1896 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938), 159-160, 213-214.
57
302 The North Carolina Historical Review
racy," so that the Republican position could be salvaged.56 Although
briefly inspired by Garfield's interest in his recommendations, he de-cided
by 1884 that Arthur's patently opportunistic handling of the
southern question and the party's endorsement of a heretical economic
policy doomed both political decency and the welfare of the Negro.
In supporting Cleveland, as he did actively in 1884 and 1892, he found
a candidate who was above all concerned with good government, who
advocated free trade, and who did not have to appeal to Negro votes.
In veering toward the Democratic party, Chamberlain seemed to ac-cept
its ideas on race as well as on civil service and trade.
After 1884 Chamberlain denied allegiance to any party. His view-points
conformed to those of Mugwumps, those political independents
who lived along the eastern seaboard, who were of Anglo-Saxon,
Protestant, and New England backgrounds, and who "generally ad
vocated tariff reductions, sound currency, and civil service reforms.
Like other Mugwumps, Chamberlain deplored the sectional appeal,
the waving of the "bloody shirt" in elections—often at the expense of
reform candidates. By 1890 he saw no way to ease the Negro problem
in the arena of party politics. It was better "to lay aside political agi-tation
of a question which is beyond the reach of political action." 58
Probably because of the uses he saw unsavory men make of the
powers of federal government, Chamberlain advocated a retraction
of those powers to their pre-Civil War status. In 1893 he complained
that the Legal Tender acts of 1862 and 1863 remained to "poison" the
nation's financial life, but thankfully the decisions in the Slaughter-house
Cases had saved the federal system from the "vagaries of the
era of reconstruction." 59 Thus restricted, the federal government
could do little to aid Negroes, but Chamberlain, like the Supreme
Court in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, believed that the Negro must
cease to be the special favorite of the law and take his place as a
mere citizen.
60
Chamberlain rarely criticized Supreme Court decisions. This was
so partly because the decisions pleased him and also because of his
adoration of the institution of the law. In his opinion the highest
56 Vincent P. DeSantis, Republicans Face the Southern Question (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Press [Volume I of the Seventy-Seventh Series of the Johns Hopkins Univer-sity
Studies in Historical and Political Sciences'], 1959), 105.
57 Hirshson, Farewell to the Bloody Shirt, 123.
58 Chamberlain, "The Race Problem," 518.
59 D. H. Chamberlain, "State Sovereignty Before 1789," Yale Review, II (November,
1893), 250-251.
60 United States v. Stanley, United States v. Ryan, United States v. Nichols, United
States v. Singleton, and Robinson and Wife v. Memphis and Charleston Railroad
Company, 109 U.S. 3 (1883).
A Carpetbagger's Conversion to White Supremacy 303
achievement of English-speaking peoples was the law, whose para-mount
concept was stare decisis, the use of precedent as authority.
Precedent too was the basis of society: "Our own American polity—
a Constitutional Democracy—draws its strength, and ever will draw
it, largely from such conservative forces as lie in the idea of stare
decisis." Precedent, law, continuity—these were the essential founda-tions
of civilization. That of the Greeks, with all its noble ideas, had
withered for lack of law.61
As an institution, the law seemed no more able than the Republican
party to deal with the Negro question. It was, however, a way of
conserving those old-time values which the Protestant church had
guarded in the past and which Negroes had to acquire if they were
to become self-governing. Self-reliance, private initiative, hard work—
the Puritan qualities—were icons which Chamberlain, who posthum-ously
published his rejection of the "whole Christian religion,"
62
transferred from the church to the shrine of law. The conservators of
the law which he helped to construct—the Yale Law School, the New
York Bar Association, and the American Bar Association—together
with the Supreme Court could defend American traditions against
the "mad waves of nullification, insurrection, anarchy, and social-ism,"
63 and, he might have added, premature Negro suffrage.
From worship of the Anglo-Saxon institution of law, it was no long
step to the "scientific" racism of the "law" of evolution. The studies
of Sir Henry Maine revealed to Chamberlain a natural history of
law,64 and from the writings of William Graham Sumner65 (whom
he knew), Herbert Spencer, Walter Bagehot, and John Fiske, he
found stages of evolution for races.
66 Obviously on a lower social level
61 D. H. Chamberlain, "The State Judiciary—Its Place in the American Constitutional
System," in University of Michigan Political Science Association (ed.), Constitutional
History of the United States as Seen in the Development of American Law (New
York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1889), 284, hereinafter cited as Chamberlain, "The
State Judiciary"; D. H. Chamberlain, The Doctrine of Stare Decisis (New York:
Baker, Voorhis and Co., 1885), 26, 30, 28, hereinafter cited as Chamberlain, Stare
Decisis.
62 D. H. Chamberlain, "Some Conclusions of a Free-Thinker," North American
Review, CLXXXVI (October, 1907), 194.
63 Chamberlain, "The State Judiciary," 285.
64 Chamberlain, "Trial by Jury," 1; Chamberlain, Stare Decisis, 28-29.
65 In 1885 Chamberlain thought that Sumner disliked him because of the South's
role in defeating Samuel J. Tilden, whom Sumner supported. D. H. Chamberlain to
Simeon E. Baldwin, August 22, 1885, Simeon E. Baldwin Collection, Yale University
Library. But in 1896 he spoke fraternally of "Bill" Sumner, praised his scholarship
and teaching, and reckoned that if the Yale administration were not "medieval"
Sumner would be the university president. D. H. Chamberlain, Debating and Parlia-mentary
Practice at Yale (New York: Privately printed, 1896), 13-14.
66 D. H. Chamberlain, The Power of History: An Address Delivered before the
Westborough (Mass.) Historical Society, January 19, 1899 (n. p., 1900[?]), 3-5 herein-after
cited as Chamberlain, Power of History; Chamberlain, "The State Judiciary,"
240-241; Chamberlain, "Trial by Jury," 41-42; Green, Personal Recollections, 12-13.
304 The North Carolina Historical Review
as a slave, the Negro also must have been on a lower level of devel-opment,
for, Chamberlain erroneously averred, the Negro never re-volted
against his enslavement. The one area in which the Negro did
manifest aggressiveness—rape—only damned him as barbaric in Cham-berlain's
mind.
Evolution also supported Chamberlain's opposition to imperialism,
just as it gave other racists arguments to the contrary. It was true,
he agreed, that nations could not stand still: "The law is—Progress
or Retrogression." But Americans in Hawaii or the Philippines would
not submit to the rule of Asiatic majorities and would have to suspend
their system of political and legal equality. Chamberlain, assuming
the inevitability of racial clashes, bade expansionists to heed the
"voice of warning" from South Carolina and to divert their energies
to the exploitation of North America.67
Evolutionists and conservatives, critics of democracy like Thomas
Carlyle, John Ruskin, Henry Maine, and W. E. H. Lecky, enhanced
for Chamberlain, upon his retirement, the study of history. If law
could institutionalize the civilization of Massachusetts, history could
popularize, could "keep," "advance," and "hand it on to the waiting
generations." The value of history to a people could easily be under-stood
by observing the sad, but natural, plight of the Negro with his
"absolute lack of anything that may be called ... a history." Were
it in his power, Chamberlain would have granted to the Negro the
greatest boon possible—not suffrage, public office, or education, but
"a record of ancestral character and achievements which would put
him on an equality with other . . . races of men." 68
So far as Chamberlain, after many years of thought, could reason,
the Negro in America must await his history, must "follow the exam-ple
of time itself, which indeed innovateth greatly, but quietly, and
by degrees scarce to be perceived." 69 Was he aware of the ironic
applicability of these last words to his own history?
67 D. H. Chamberlain, Imperialism, An Address before the Quaboag Historical Society,
Warren, Mass., Dec. 6, 1898 (North Brookfield: Privately printed, 1898), 1, 6-9.
68 Chamberlain, Power of History, 10, 15-16.
69 Chamberlain, Stare Decisis, 30, quoting Bacon.
JOHN ALEXANDER, ANGLICAN MISSIONARY
By Thomas C. Parramore*
The story of the advent, decline, and collapse of the Church of
England in America is one of immoderate futility. Aside from the
basic consideration that the desire to flee the authority of the estab-lished
church was a primary impetus to colonization, there were
numberless formidable obstacles to Anglican success in America.
These obstacles-—arduous passage to and travel within the colonies,
the notorious inadequacy of clerical stipends, the deprivations com-mon
to layman and cleric alike—came into focus during the efforts
of the church to recruit priests for service in the colonies. The gener-ations
during which the church basked in the favor of the crown had
not bred in the Anglican clergy sizable reservoirs of that zeal which
impelled one to forego a comfortable English benefice for the perils
of a frontier mission. While some tenuous case might be made for the
attractions of the more advanced colonies, the appeal of North Caro-lina,
by all accounts, might be compared with that of Siberia for the
subjects of the czar. Even with the Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel in Foreign Parts straining every resource, fewer than fifty
Anglican ministers ever accepted appointments in North Carolina
during the century in which the church labored there.1
The majority of forty-plus Anglican missionaries who eventually
came to North Carolina soon regretted it; many broke under the
physical strain or lapsed into irresponsible behavior after confronta-tion
with the challenge of service. Only a few withstood the hardships
and opposition in the colonies, including the final apocalypse of po-litical
revolution, without stain upon their integrity. The stories of
Daniel Earl and Charles Pettigrew have been told, that of John Alex-ander
has not.
Little is known of John Alexander before his appearance in North
* Dr. Parramore is assistant professor of history, Meredith College, Raleigh.
1 Sarah McCulloh Lemmon, "The Genesis of the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of
North Carolina, 1701-1823," North Carolina Historical Review, XXVIII (October,
1951), 436, hereinafter cited as Lemmon, "Genesis of the Protestant Episcopal
Diocese." This source gives forty-four as the number of Anglican priests licensed for
North Carolina. Names of forty-seven priests are given in Spencer Ervin, "The
Anglican Church in North Carolina," Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal
Church, XXV (June, 1956), 158-161, hereinafter cited as Ervin, "Anglican Church
in North Carolina."
306 The North Carolina Historical Review
Carolina late in 1762. He was born of a Scotch-Irish, Presbyterian
family in northern Ireland about 1738 and was educated at the famous
old grammar school established by Edward VI at Shrewsbury.2 Soon
after reaching years of discretion he was received into the Presby-terian
ministry and assigned a congregation in northern Ireland. He
was evidently an idealistic and adventurous young cleric for in 1762
he requested and was granted leave to travel in America for three
years to carry the Word to colonials. Doubtless inspired by a desire
to combat evil at the source, he chose as his mission field the province
of North Carolina, where large segments of the Scotch-Irish settlers
had never seen a minister of any denomination.
During the winter of 1762-1763 John Alexander earned his bread
by preaching to congregations in the western part of Beaufort County
(about to be cut off as Pitt County), where most of the population
professed Anglican sentiments. The experience was destined to change
his life, for the Reverend Alexander's principal convert was himself;
he became interested in the tenets of the Church of England and re-solved
to seek holy orders to continue his work as an Anglican mis-sionary.
Strongly supported by members of his congregations, he
applied to the Reverend Alexander Stewart, the missionary stationed
in that part of the province, for a recommendation to the Bishop of
London, before whom all candidates for ordination were required to
appear. Unfortunately, Parson Stewart had received an adverse im-pression
of the young Presbyterian's character and declined to give
his recommendation. In a letter to the society in the spring of 1763,
Stewart observed that the applicant had
wrought upon ye people so much in Pytt county, that they were preparing
a recommendation for him to ye Bishop of London, & ye Society [,] & I
had many enemies because I refused to sign ye recommendation. But he dis-covered
himself by his unguardedness and over hott temper too soon, &
by y* means stopp'd their proceedings.3
Describing Alexander as "between 25 and 30 years of age, tho' he
calls himself younger, a small man and mark

^3
North Carolina State Library
Raleigh
Sumnten 1966
The North Carolina Historical Review
Christopher Crittenden, Editor in Chief
Mrs. Memory F. Mitchell, Editor
Miss Marie D. Moore, Editorial Associate
ADVISORY EDITORIAL BOARD
John Fries Blair William S. Powell
Miss Sarah M. Lemmon David Stick
Henry S. Stroupe
STATE DEPARTMENT OF ARCHIVES AND HISTORY
EXECUTIVE BOARD
Josh L. Horne, Chairman
Miss Gertrude Sprague Carraway Ralph P. Hanes
T. Harry Gatton Hugh T. Lefler
Fletcher M. Green Edward W. Phifer
Christopher Crittenden, Director
This review was established in January, 1924, as a medium of publication and dis-cussion
of history in North Carolina. It is issued to other institutions by exchange,
but to the general public by subscription only. The regular price is $4.00 per year.
Members of the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, Inc., for which
the annual dues are $5.00, receive this publication without further payment. Back
numbers still in print are available for $1.00 per number. Out-of-print numbers may
be obtained from Kraus Reprint Corporation, 16 East 46th Street, New York, New
York, 10017, or on microfilm from University Microfilms, 313 North First Street, Ann
Arbor, Michigan. Persons desiring to quote from this publication may do so without
special permission from the editors provided full credit is given to the North Caro-lina
Historical Review. The Review is published quarterly by the State Department
of Archives and History, Education Building, Corner of Edenton and Salisbury Streets,
Raleigh, North Carolina, 27601. Mailing address is Box 1881, Raleigh, North Carolina,
27602. Second class postage paid at Raleigh, North Carolina, 27602.
COVER—Raleigh's Fire Department, 1890, showing "Championship"
Volunteer Rescue Steam Fire Engine Company. The building was located
between the courthouse and Pullen Building, predecessor to the Insurance
Building. Photograph by Will Wynne lent by Mrs. James W. Reid. For
an article on Raleigh, see pages 261 to 285.
North Carolina State Library
Raleigh
Volume XLIII Published in July, 1966 Number 3
CONTENTS
RALEIGH-AN EXAMPLE OF THE "NEW SOUTH"? 261
Sarah McCulloh Lemmon
A CARPETBAGGER'S CONVERSION TO
WHITE SUPREMACY 286
Wilton B. Fowler
JOHN ALEXANDER, ANGLICAN MISSIONARY 305
Thomas C. Parramore
JOSEPHUS DANIELS AND THE PUBLICITY CAMPAIGN
FOR NAVAL AND INDUSTRIAL PREPAREDNESS
BEFORE WORLD WAR I 316
Theodore A. Thelander
ANNIE OAKLEY IN THE SOUTH 333
Claude E. Flory
BOOK REVIEWS 344
HISTORICAL NEWS 370
BOOK REVIEWS
v/ Lee, The Lower Cape Fear in Colonial Days, by Herbert R. Paschal 344
Mitchell, Legal Aspects of Conscription and Exemption in
North Carolina, 1861-1865, by Richard Bardolph 345
HORN, Tennessee's War, 1861-1865: Described by Participants,
by Holman Hamilton 346
Isaac, Prohibition and Politics: Turbulent Decades in Tennessee,
1885-1920, by Willard B. Gatewood 347
RICHARDSON, The Negro in the Reconstruction of Florida, 1865-1877,
by Charles W. Arnade 349
Griffin, Newspaper Story of a Town: A History of Danville,
Kentucky, by Robert N. Elliott 349
Culliford, William Strachey, 1572-1621, by James K. Huhta 350
^ Berkeley and Berkeley, The Reverend John Clayton, A Parson with
a Scientific Mind: His Scientific Writings and Other Related
Papers, by Robert W. Ramsey 351
V Wright, The Prose Works of William Byrd of Westover: Narratives
of a Colonial Virginian, by Carlos R. Allen, Jr 352
Bargar, Lord Dartmouth and the American Revolution,
by Barbara Brandon Schnorrenberg 353
Quinn and Skelton, The Principall Navigations Voiages and
Discoveries of the English Nation, by William S. Powell 354
Sachs and Hoogenboom, The Enterprising Colonials: Society on the
Eve of the Revolution, by Jack P. Greene 356
v Grant, American Forts : Yesterday and Today,
by John D. F. Phillips 357
Wynes, The Negro in the South Since 1865: Selected Essays in
American Negro History, by W. B. Yearns 359
Woodard, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, by Paul Murray 359
Link and Patrick, Writing Southern History: Essays in Historio-graphy
in Honor of Fletcher M. Green, by Clement Eaton 361
McCalmon and Moe, Creating Historical Drama: A Guide for the
Community and the Interested Individual, by Arlin Turner 362
^Prince, Steam Locomotives and Boats: Southern Railway System,
by Michael Dunn 363
McCormick, The Second American Party System: Party Formation
in the Jacksonian Era, by William S. Hoffmann 364
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B.
Johnson, Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and
Statements of the President, 1963-196b, by Robert Moats Miller . 365
Other Recent Publications .366
RALEIGH—AN EXAMPLE OF THE "NEW SOUTH"?
By Sarah McCulloh Lemmon*
The term "New South" calls to mind the spectacular rise of Birming-ham
and Atlanta, the speeches and writings of Henry Grady and
"Marse Henry" Watterson, the consolidation of southern railroads, and
the rise of cotton mills, steel mills, and cigarette factories in the
Piedmont crescent from Virginia to Alabama. It has been generally
accepted that the entire South supported the new philosophy, although
the evidence presented has been confined almost entirely to the Pied-mont,
in itself not the major portion of the region.
The question then arises as to the validity of the term "New South"
if it is applied to all of the former Confederate states. A depth study
of minor cities and towns, of Coastal Plain and Blue Ridge Mountains,
should be undertaken to see if for too long historians have let the part
stand for the whole, or if in fact the old generalization holds true. The
present study of Raleigh is one such attempt to discover if a small
town somewhat removed from the chief area of development shared
the views, the ambitions, and the characteristics of the New South.
Four characteristics of the New South as generally described will be
used as guidelines to analyze the changes that took place in Raleigh
between 1876 and 1895. Disregarding agricultural diversification,
which would seem inappropriate for an urban area, these are: the
theme of reconciliation with the North; the quest for industry; the
beginning of public education; and the improvement and modern-ization
of cities. Some events and some spokesmen are included even
though they affected and were affected by Raleigh solely as the capital
of the state.
Among the North Carolinians who spoke or inspired remarks ex-pressing
the hope for reconciliation with the North were United States
Senator Zebulon B. Vance, Captain Samuel A. Ashe, editor of the
Raleigh News and Observer, Governor Thomas Jarvis, the Reverend
Thomas Dixon, Jr., and Governor Thomas M. Holt. Vance pursued a
course in the Senate which attempted to heal the wounds of the war.
An admirer from Virginia, after congratulating him on an excellent
speech, wrote in 1879:
Dr. Lemmon is professor of history, Meredith College, Raleigh.
262 The North Carolina Historical Review
I can only express the hope that the genius, with which you are gifted, may
continue to shed its charming radiance over the hearts and minds of men
—
and in due time, by your influence and that of other patriots, the country
may be brought back to that happy, fraternal association which will unite
all sections in an enduring union.1
The following year Vance was invited by Tammany Hall to address
the citizens of New York City on national issues.
2
Captain Ashe carried on a correspondence with Benjamin S. Pardie,
of the New England Manufacturers' and Mechanics' Institute, which
led to the following letter from the latter in 1882:
If the great end I have in view can be accomplished, viz : a homogeneous
people and as a necessary corollary—a mighty free republic in which every
citizen is a sovereign and in which every man is an illustration of Burn's
[sic] noble idea
"The gowd is but the guineas stamp
A man's a man for a* that"
I shall feel fully paid for labor time & trouble—You and I have been
through the crucible of war as hundreds of thousands of our brave country-men
have—We know now the price our forefathers paid for the liberties
we all enjoy—It is because I believe you, & men of your stamp, love them
as sincerely as we who wore the blue did, that I have talked frankly to
you. . . . [The] one solvent for the small remnant of difference between
the sections is our mutual interest in industrial progress—That will even-tually—
God grant it may be very soon—terminate the sectional rancor
that has cankered our body politic, and make our country healthy and
sound in all its parts
—
3
At the Boston Exposition of 1883 North Carolina had an exhibit, in
conjunction with which the North Carolina Press Association held its
annual meeting and invited Governor Jarvis to speak. Because of the
good reports of his address the Grand Army of the Republic invited
him to address their body, following which they took him to Con-necticut
to speak to the organization there. As Ashe later wrote: "Had
there been any lingering vestiges of unpleasant feeling, they could not
have survived that fortunate occasion. The fountains of patriotism had
been struck and the waters gushed forth."
4
1 Carter M. Louthan to Z. B. Vance, June [?], 1879. Vance Papers, Personal Col-lection,
Archives, State Department of Archives and History, Raleigh, hereinafter
cited as Vance Papers.
2 Richard Croker and Bourke Cockerane to Z. B. Vance, October 17, 1880, Vance
Papers.
3 Benjamin S. Pardie to Samuel A. Ashe, December 2, 1882, Samuel A. Ashe Papers,
Archives, hereinafter cited as Ashe Papers.
* Samuel A'Court Ashe, History of North Carolina (Greensboro: Charles L. Van
Noppen, Vol. I, 1908; Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton, Vol. II, 1925), II, 1187.
Raleigh—An Example of the "New South"? 263
The Reverend Thomas Dixon, Jr., at one time a Raleigh clergyman,
preached a sermon in New York City in which he anticipated that
the Farmers' Alliance would reduce sectionalism and help men to
"forget the bitterness of the past and throw off the curse of traditional
sectionalism." 5 Edwin A. Alderman was also noted as an exemplar of
good will toward the North.6 One of the best examples of this spirit
was the speech by Governor Holt at the opening of the Southern
Inter-States Exposition in Raleigh in 1891, in which he said:
Let all North Carolinians and all Southerners prove themselves worthy
descendants of the fathers who have glorified Southern annals. Let us take
by the hand with a cordial grasp the citizens of any other section who
seek Southern hospitality ... to bring together the people of all sections
under a common flag, and with aspirations for a common destiny of un-paralleled
grandeur in this favored Southern land. . . . Loyal to its own
customs and institutions, true to its honorable past, it would gladly forget
in the happy career expanding before it that there had ever been occasion
for drawing the sword.7
Thus both North Carolina and Raleigh had their share in furthering
reconciliation between the South and the North.
The second point considered characteristic of the New South was
the growth of manufacturing, the most common instance of which
was the "cotton mill crusade/' The desire to "out-Yankee the Yankee"
led to "remission of taxes for a term to encourage the location of a
plant. . . . [Enterprisers] were cried up as Messiahs, and the general
public made itself an informal chamber of commerce to advance the
industry." 8 As early as 1882 a reporter from the Atlantic Monthly
noted "the extremely happy and satisfied feeling of the manufacturers,
and their confident hopefulness in regard to their business in the
future . . . their somewhat exultant and triumphant mood. They are
. . . extending this industry with great energy and rapidity." He noted
that offers of more northern capital than they needed were being re-ceived.
9 The annual reports on the state of business which were pre-sented
in the Manufacturers' Record were widely quoted and noted
in southern newspapers, usually producing such remarks as contained
in this editorial from the State Chronicle in Raleigh in 1888:
6 State Chronicle (Raleigh), December 17, 1890, hereinafter cited as State Chronicle.
8 Dumas Malone, Edwin A. Alderman (New York: Doubleday, 1940), 94, herein-after
cited as Malone, Edwin A. Alderman.
7 State Chronicle, October 2, 1891.
8 Broadus Mitchell and George Sinclair Mitchell, The Industrial Revolution in the
South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1930), 11.
""Studies in the South," Atlantic Monthly, XLIX (June, 1882), 746.
264 The North Carolina Historical Review
1887 in the way of the increase in numbers and capital invested in manu-facturing
enterprises in the South has been a most remarkable one. . . .
Think of it! Two hundred and fifty-six million dollars invested in new
enterprises in one year ! This is a gratifying showing. . . .
10
Florence, Alabama; Norfolk, Virginia; and even country villages were
making their efforts to secure investors who would transform them
overnight into metropolises, as shown in a half-page advertisement in
the News and Observer extolling the virtues of Bedford City, Virginia,
with miles of streets lighted by electricity, factories and mills running
full time, "The beautiful booming town by the Blue Ridge!" n
North Carolina took full part in the drive to secure industry. It was
obvious to the thinking men of the state that water power brought in
more money than farming.12 The story dramatically told by the
Mitchells in The Rise of Cotton Mills in the South and The Industrial
Revolution in the South need not be repeated here. It was not only
cotton mills, however; it was much, much more. The furniture industry
began at High Point in the 1880's;
13 the cottonseed oil industry was
started;
14 a good quality of china clay was worked beginning in
1888; 15 and the rise of the bright tobacco industry transformed Dur-ham
and many another town into busy cities.
16 W. H. Malone wrote
to Captain Ashe, in support of the proposal that Vance be appointed
Commissioner of Patents in Washington, "North Carolina is already
outstripping most of the Southern States in the number of patents on
new and useful inventions." 1T One bright reporter suggested a new
industry for the state—the canning of preserved persimmons.18 There
was a revival of efforts to mine corundum, mica, monazite, and cop-per.
19 The state's first iron and steel mill was built at Greensboro in
1890.20 The extension of railroads and their consolidation into the
10 State Chronicle, January 5, 1888.
u News and Observer (Raleigh), August 31, 1890, hereinafter cited as News and
Observer.
"Broadus Mitchell, The Rise of Cotton Mills in the South (Baltimore: Johns Hop-kins
Press, 1921), 144, hereinafter cited as Mitchell, The Rise of Cotton Mills.
"Paul H. Buck, The Road to Reunion (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1938), 179.
14 New South (Wilmington), December 24, 1882, hereinafter cited as New South.
15 [James Curtis Ballagh, (ed.)], Economic History, Volume VI of The South in
the Building of the Nation, edited by Julian Alvin Carroll Chandler and Others
(Richmond: Southern Historical Publication Society, 12 volumes, c. 1909-1913), 208,
hereinafter cited as Ballagh, Economic History.
"Nannie May Tilley, The Bright-Tobacco Industry, 1860-1929 (Chapel Hill: Uni-versity
of North Carolina Press, 1948), passim. A brief summary of the rise of
Durham, emphasizing its industrial growth, may be found in William Kenneth Boyd,
The Story of Durham: City of the New South (Durham: Duke University Press,
1925).
17 W. H. Malone to Samuel A. Ashe, December 4, 1884, Ashe Papers.
w New South, December 24, 1882.
19 Ballagh, Economic History, 235-237 ; Raleigh Register, March 4, 1885.
80 State Chronicle, September 2, 1890.
Raleigh—An Example of the "New South" ? 265
Southern Railway System and the Seaboard Air Line was proceeding
rapidly. As a sign of returning prosperity, one editor happily stated
that "it should serve to encourage all of us in the hope for better
times." 21
The city of Raleigh shared in this industrial interest, seeking ear-nestly,
if not too enthusiastically, to secure new industry. Talk about
building a cotton factory began as early as 1875, when the editor of
the Daily Constitution wrote:
How about that cotton factory? Wilmington has one, Charlotte is thinking
about establishing one and Raleigh should not be behind the times. Mer-chants
and capitalists, awake from your lethargy, and see if something
cannot be done toward adding this improvement to our enterprising city.22
Apparently there were no results, for thirteen years later Editor
Josephus Daniels reported that a meeting had been called to discuss
the establishment of a cotton factory.
23 Mayor Alfred A. Thompson
and merchant W. C. Stronach wrote in a letter to the editor: "The
establishment of a cotton mill here would be of such great advantage
to the growth of Raleigh, and the interest manifested by many of our
leading business men in that direction, induces us to call a meeting,"
which was duly held in the mayor's office in January, 1888. Their letter
continued:
If the large amount of capital now invested by our citizens in bonds and
mortgages could be devoted to the establishment of cotton mills . . . the
real estate of the city would rapidly increase in value, and hundreds of
employees would earn a living who now find it very difficult to find em-ployment.
24
Following the meeting, a committee was appointed to collect all the
needful information on erecting and operating a mill, with ten of the
city's most prominent citizens serving on it.
25 "All Together," cried
the State Chronicle, which pointed out that the Durham mills were
paying 20 per cent dividends, while Concord paid 34 per cent. A mill
in Raleigh would give jobs to people, who then would spend the money
in the community. "All the money expended in wages is put into cir-
21 News and Observer, January 31, 1886.
22 Daily Constitution (Raleigh), July 9, 1875.
28 State Chronicle, January 26, 1888.
24 State Chronicle, January 26, 1888.
25 State Chronicle, February 2, 1888. The ten were: W. C. Stronach, chairman;
G. E. Leach, E. B. Barbee, G. Rosenthal, C. E. Johnson, J. J. Thomas, W. S. Prim-rose,
C. G. Latta, N. B. Broughton, and A. A. Thompson.
266 The North Carolina Historical Review
culation, and the merchants secure an increase of trade by reason of
the amounts paid out to operatives in the factory." "Enterprise begets
enterprise," continued the Chronicle. "One factory insures the building
of others." Rhetorically asking if Raleigh could succeed in getting a
mill, the paper proceeded:
It will [succeed] if the capitalists of Raleigh will for once pull together.
It will if those who have money will examine the reports of the cotton mills
in the State and invest their money where it will pay best. It will if all
our people will look this question squarely in the face : What is to become
of Raleigh unless we do something to increase its business? 26
Yet by September there was still no mill. A Chamber of Industry and
Commerce, however, had been organized in August of that year; it
began to push the project.
27 By the following May $62,000 had been
raised and directors chosen;28
in July six acres near the railroad were
purchased, and officers for the company were elected; 29 by March
of 1890 the building was ready for machinery to be installed.
30 At this
point the treasurer began having difficulty in collecting money pledged,
and the following notice appeared in the papers: "A few have not paid
the full amount due on stock in Raleigh cotton mills. The last install-ment
was due Apr. 15th and those who have not yet paid are requested
to do so without further delay." 31 Encouragement was offered by way
of a gentleman who may have been fictitious. This gentleman was
reported to have visited the partly completed mill and to have said:
Now, listen to me : A Raleigh cotton mill can pay just as great a per cent
as any mill any where, and I want to record a prophecy right here, right
now, that the Raleigh mill will make as good a report after the first year
as any mill operated in this whole country. You will see it too.32
In spite of this encouragement, in July it became necessary to issue
$50,000 in 6 per cent bonds to obtain sufficient fluid cash to complete
the factory and put it into operation.33 This was followed with addi-tional
propagandizing to the effect that "the building of the cotton
28 State Chronicle, February 2, 1888.
'"State Chronicle, September 14, 1888.
28 State Chronicle, May 24, 1889.
29 State Chronicle, July 12, 1889. The officers were: Julius Lewis, president; John H.
Winder, vice-president; George V. Strong, Jr., secretary-treasurer; and C. H. Belvin,
director.
30 News and Observer, March 4, 1890.
31 Daily State Chronicle (Raleigh), April 25, 1890, hereinafter cited as Daily State
Chronicle. (The weekly State Chronicle continued under the same editorship.)
32 Daily State Chronicle, May 10, 1890.
33 Daily State Chronicle, July 19, 1890.
North Carolina State Library
Raleigh
Raleigh—An Example of the "New South"? 267
Raleigh's first cotton mills began operating in 1890; this picture was taken in 1920.
Photograph from files of State Department of Archives and History.
factory, now nearing completion, had just shown Raleigh how to build
factories"; the opinion of "a big business man" was "that there would
be another one built here very soon. In fact a movement had already
begun in that direction." 34 In August, 1890, the mill finally began
operation, and the superintendent sent the first cotton ever combed
in Raleigh as a tribute to Josephus Daniels at the Chronicle. Said the
editor, "It is evidence of the opening of a new industrial era. It means
employment of people and circulation of money. Boom the mills on
to colossal success, and may many more mills follow—all success-fully."
35 The first shipment was made to Philadelphia in September,36
and by October 1,500 pounds of spun yarn were being produced
daily.
37 The mill was described as "a handsome two-story brick struc-ture,
ornamented at either corner with imposing towers and equipped
with the most improved factory machinery." Located in the northwest
section of the city on the Raleigh and Gaston Railroad, it had 6,000
spindles, operated eleven hours a day, and was to be surrounded by
34 Daily State Chronicle, July 19, 1890.
35 Daily State Chronicle, August 7, 1890.
86 News and Observer, September 4, 1890.
87 News and Observer, October 11, 1890.
268 The North Carolina Historical Review
company houses for the operatives.38 Thus began Raleigh's first cotton
mill, to be followed in the next two years by two others.
39
One of the means employed to interest foreign capital in southern
investments was the exposition. The period of the New South was
noted for its many expositions, among the most famous being the
International Cotton Exposition in Atlanta in 1881 and the Piedmont
Exposition in the same city in 1887. The two expositions held in
Raleigh were not as well known, although "the North Carolina indus-trial
exhibit, at Raleigh, in 1884, carried on the Atlanta spirit and made
it local to the State in a way that assisted cotton mill growth."40 A
brochure setting forth the plans for the exposition explained that the
recent display by North Carolina of her products at Boston—the same
event which led to one of the reconciliation speeches described earlier
—aroused interest in having one of her own. It was designed to show
the variety of products in the state, the native woods, minerals, fish-eries,
cattle, water power and manufactured goods, vacation areas,
good transportation, and the special advantages of each county. The
planning committee hoped that as a result of the exposition, North
Carolina would see that there were no intrastate antagonistic interests,
capital would spread out around the state, buyers and investors from
other states would become interested, and farming methods would be
improved.41 Erected in the western part of the city near the present
campus of North Carolina State University, the main building was
very large, with battlements and flagstaffs. A spur of the railroad ran
directly into the building to facilitate unloading the heavy machinery
exhibited there.
42 A central hall, a grandstand, and a machinery
shed completed the buildings.43 At noon on October 1 the exhibit
formally opened; buildings and grounds were electrically lighted, and
flowers had been especially planted. The Raleigh Register admired
it as far surpassing its predecessors, and as "a grateful surprise" even
to its friends. "There has been nothing like it" in North Carolina, it
concluded.44 The "deportment" of the visitors and the beauty of the
women were commended. An exhibit of native gems from Macon
38 North Carolina Intelligencer (Raleigh), November 5, 1890, hereinafter cited as
North Carolina Intelligencer.
39 Although Mitchell, The Rise of Cotton Mills, 136, states that the first cotton mill
in Raleigh was erected in 1887, it is apparent that 1890 is the correct date.
40 Mitchell, The Rise of Cotton Mills, 125.
41 The North Carolina State Exposition from Oct. 1 to Oct. 28th, 188U. A prospectus
(Raleigh: n.p., 1884), 3-4.
42 Raleigh Register, July 23, 1884.
^Visitor's Guide to the North Carolina State Exposition, 188U (n.p., n.d.), 69-71,
hereinafter cited as Visitor's Guide.
"Raleigh Register, October 8, 1884.
Raleigh—An Example of the "New South" ? 269
Exhibits of many kinds were featured at the Industrial Exposition held in Raleigh
in 1884.
An exhibit featuring tobacco and tobacco machinery was called "North Carolina's
Bright Hope." Both photographs on this page from files of State Department of
Archives and History.
270 The North Carolina Historical Review
County was admired, and a table made by a Wake County man from
60 varieties of native wood cut into 275 blocks was noted.45 Among
the main mechanical exhibits were pipe-fitting machinery, looms in
operation, car wheels and brake shoes, a cotton gin, electric-light
machinery, knitting by steam, and roller corn mills. The State Board
of Agriculture displayed minerals, wines, tobacco, fruits in jars, fish,
birds, edible reptiles, fertilizers, and native woods. The Wake County
exhibit, of which a Raleigh man was chairman, had in addition to the
usual agricultural products samples of ladies' needlework, photo-graphs
of public buildings and residences, serpentine, granite, a pyra-mid
of fruit trees, a 100-horsepower Watts Campbell Corliss engine,
and a 50-horsepower Harris Corliss engine.46 The city aldermen set
up a Bureau of Intelligence to help visitors find room and board while
they were in Raleigh. The aldermen hoped many people would come
from Pennsylvania and New England.47 Financially the exhibition
was a success, but perhaps more important were the effects on the
state. According to the local press, new friendships were formed,
local jealousies were curtailed, better sectional understanding was
promoted, patriotism was increased, and an honest pride coupled
with generous rivalry was promoted. A repeat performance was urged
for the next year.48
A touch of humor was provided by one William D. Harrington, an
eighty-five-year-old gentleman from Ephronia, who opposed the expo-sition
from the beginning on the ground that its great expense would
cause the Democrats to lose the coming election. He asked: "Now
which had you rather have, a great exposition and a radical Governor,
or a poor exposition and a Democratic Governor?" He urged its post-ponement
until after November.49 His fears, however, proved ground-less.
In 1891 a smaller exposition was held, officially entitled the South-ern
Inter-States Exposition.50 At a meeting of the Raleigh Chamber of
Commerce in December, 1890, A. A. Thompson had moved the ap-pointment
of a State Exposition Committee to initiate another expo-sition;
Colonel W. S. Primrose, chairman of the 1884 exposition, had
been made chairman of the committee; and plans had proceeded.51
45 Raleigh Register, October 22, 1884.
"Visitor's Guide, 75-87.
47 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, City of Raleigh, July 11, 1884, Municipal
Building, Raleigh, hereinafter cited as Minutes of the Board of Aldermen.
"Raleigh Register, October 29, 1884.
49 William D. Harrington to Samuel A. Ashe, April 19, 1884, Ashe Papers.
60 State Chronicle, October 1, 1891.
61 Daily State Chronicle, December 10, 1890.
Raleigh—An Example of the "New South"? 271
Raleigh raised $8,500 and the Southern Inter-State Immigration Bu-reau
completed the sponsorship.52 Running from October 1 to Novem-ber
28, the 1891 exposition had representation from thirteen states. On
opening day all business in Raleigh was suspended and Fayetteville
Street was lined with thousands of people to watch the "grand pa-rade."
53 Apparently this fair was not a financial success, for the
State Chronicle declared after it was over, "It may not have been so
much of a success as was wished, but it has certainly done Raleigh
good in many ways." 54
Also doing Raleigh good in many ways was its new Chamber of
Commerce, formed on August 28, 1888, with Major R. S. Tucker as
its first president. At the end of his first year in office he made a
speech summarizing the progress of the city during that time. If one
recalls the inordinate length of time it took the city to start a cotton
mill, one can appreciate the major's opening remarks:
Raleigh had a slow but steady growth these past long years, and now
(1888) appeared to be at a standstill . . . dull, and without energy . . .
somewhat disheartened. The failure, just before this time, of one of our
banks, had cast a gloom over the city. Something was necessary to be
done to give hope and confidence to our people.
Continuing, he said: "The organization of our Chamber at once in-spired
the hope for better times." 55
It would seem that it indeed had
something to do with the increased tempo of new industry, for a list
of the manufactories begun during 1888-1889 and cited by the major
included: North Carolina Wagon Company, Greystone Granite and
Construction Company, Raleigh Cotton Factory, Cider and Vinegar
Manufactory, Wetmore Shoe and Leather Company, two additional
tobacco warehouses, and a suspender company. The first refrigerator
cars carried grapes from Raleigh to the North in July, 1889. The most
important immediate task, concluded the major, was to enlarge the
tobacco interests.
56 Exulted the Chronicle, "It is absolutely certain
that Raleigh is destined to be a large and important manufacturing
centre." 57
Other industries not mentioned by the president of the Chamber
of Commerce included the Oak City Steam Laundry, founded in
62 State Chronicle, October 1, 1891.
68 Raleigh Signal, October 10, 1891.
"State Chronicle, November 28, 1891.
65 State Chronicle, September 13, 1889.
68 State Chronicle, September 13, 1889.
67 Daily State Chronicle, April 23, 1890.
272 The North Carolina Historical Review
1887; 58 Messrs. Barbee and Pope's candy manufactory; 59 a phosphate
fertilizer business in which rock was brought from Wilmington and
crushed in Raleigh;60 the Raleigh Paper Company;61 and a nursery
business which shipped thousands of rose cuttings to the northern
markets.62 The Raleigh ice factory opened in 1890, making eight tons
of ice per day,63 shortly followed by a second.64 The Caraleigh Mills,
manufacturing dress gingham and employing 250 men by the end of
the nineties, opened in 1892; and the Pilot Cotton Mills employing
175 workers began operation in 1893.65 The Raleigh and Gaston Rail-road
shops turned out a locomotive in 1890 that "for speed, strength
and splendid finish cannot be excelled by any piece of work in Amer-ica."
66 As Daniels of the Chronicle remarked in 1890:
Raleigh doesn't exactly boom, but she moves. There is never a month that
something permanently substantial is not effected. There is talk now of a
furniture factory. Two gentlemen of Tennessee have offered to put $11,000
into a $20,000 plant. That settles it. The factory will come. It will arrive
on schedule time next fall.67
He was right—it did come.
The biggest disappointment to Raleigh citizens was that the city
never became important in the new and valuable tobacco industry.
The first tobacco ever brought to Raleigh to market was sold on
September 26, 1884, in a small temporary warehouse. At the time,
Governor Jarvis made a speech predicting a fine future for the city.
During the next three months, three large warehouses were erected.68
Two plug and chewing tobacco firms were begun, producing such
brands as Pogue's Premium, Imperial, Old Reb, and Nickle Plate.
69
But the longed-for cigarette factory never materialized. In 1890 the
Chamber of Commerce met to hear proposals for a tobacco manufac-tory.
One E. L. Harris of Wilton in Granville County offered to give
the machinery if Raleigh would put up $6,000 in cash.70 Although
68 News and Observer, August 24, 1899.
69 News and Observer, April 3, 1890.
60 News and Observer, January 27, 1886.
81 News and Observer, July 13, 1890.
62 Julian Ralph, Dixie: or Southern Scenes and Sketches (New York: Harpers,
1895), 285.
63 News and Observer, February 21, 1890.
64 News and Observer, March 12, 1890.
85 News and Observer, August 24, 1899.
68 News and Observer, January 28, 1890.
67 Daily State Chronicle, March 20, 1890.
68 State Chronicle, October 18, 1892.
69 News and Observer, October 18, 1890.
70 Daily State Chronicle, September 3, 1890.
Raleigh—An Example of the "New South"? 273
the businessmen agreed to try, no evidence was found of their suc-cess.
Another disappointment was the lack of a boiler and iron works.
The Chronicle recorded an inquiry received from Chattanooga con-cerning
such a mill in the city. The editor replied, "Now, wouldn't
it have been a good thing if the answer could have been an imme-diate,
positive and flatfooted yes!" Raleigh was already attracting
wide attention, he continued, but needed "a little more unity, a little
more energy, and [a] little more snap." "Everybody loves a vigorous,
busy people and likes to come among them," he concluded almost
appealingly.71
In spite of the failures, the accomplishments were meritorious. At
the Chamber of Commerce banquet in April, 1890, the toasts offered
indicated some hesitancy still to commit the businessmen of the city
to an all-out campaign for industrialization, yet a sufficient pride in
accomplishments already achieved showed a cautious willingness to
proceed a little further. The first toast was: "Our City Government:
Progressive in all that pertains to the material welfare of our city
consistent with economy in expenditure and consideration of the citi-zens."
Following this were other toasts to: the Raleigh Chamber of
Commerce and Industry, the Manufacturing Interests of Raleigh, the
Raleigh Cotton Exchange, the Raleigh Tobacco Exchange, Our Edu-cational
Institutions, Our Railroad Facilities, Our City Press, and
finally, to the Future Possibilities of North Carolina as a Manufac-turing
State.
72
Raleigh attempted to keep up to date with the latest business
machines and methods. What was certainly one of the early type-writers
in the state belonged to Judge Walter Clark. To him, in 1886,
the following letter was addressed from the Governor's secretary:
I am instructed by Governor Scales to enquire of you, if you desire to sell
your caligraph and if so what amount would you take for it? The Gover-nor
would also like to know your opinion of its merits as a writing ma-chine.
73
It was not recorded whether or not the machine was sold to the Gov-ernor.
Stronach's store had the first National Cash Register in the
city, installed in January, 1886. Captain Ashe's description makes
amusing reading today:
71 Daily State Chronicle, April 17, 1890.
72 Daily State Chronicle, April 29, 1890.
73 C. N. Armfield to Walter Clark, January 8, 1886, Aubrey Lee Brooks and Hugh
Talmage Lefler (eds.), The Papers of Walter Clark (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2 volumes, 1948-1950), I, 225, 225n.
274 The North Carolina Historical Review
Pressing one or more of the keys rings a bell, opens the cash drawer, shows
the amount of the sale on one or more tablets in the glass opening above,
and records the amount on wheels inside, which are accessible only to the
proprietor, and the record once made cannot be changed without his knowl-edge.
74
The store of Messrs. Julius Lewis and Company began an ingenious
system of tapping a bell from their office to call a clerk—each one had
a certain number of taps.
75 The Singer Sewing Machine Company
gave a demonstration of fancy embroidery on one of its machines;
on April 4 the demonstrator made lilies.
76 That same month the first
phonograph in town was displayed at Briggs' hardware store; one
turned the crank and out came the strains of a brass band.77 Contests
were held among the members of the Raleigh Short-Hand Writers
Association, to which ten members belonged; a need for more persons
skilled in shorthand was expressed, however.78 An "interesting and
novel" machine arrived in 1890 which cut metal keys "as easily as a
baker can [cut] a horse cake from a bunch of dough." 79 Ten days
later an electric nickel-plated cigar lighter created much excitement
at Simpson's drug store.
80 Not to be outdone, the Department of Agri-culture
purchased the first comptometer to be put into use in Ra-leigh.
81 A letter written by one Thomas H. Sutton dated March 28,
1892, was typed, signed with a red stamp, and bore a red seal on
which was printed, "Dictated to phonograph." 82 North Carolinians
obviously did not wish to be left behind in the use of the latest inven-tions
in the business world.
A third characteristic of the New South was an interest in educa-tional
progress. There was some interest in private education, espe-cially
on the college level, but the chief concern was public education
on the elementary level. Both North Carolina and Raleigh had active
leaders in this field.
The state of public education was far from admirable in 1875 and
even later. In 1890 North Carolina was third from the bottom in the
nation in literacy; by 1900 she had fallen to the bottom in spite of
74 News and Observer, January 26, 1886.
™News and Observer, April 1, 1890.
76 News and Observer, April 3, 1890.
17 News and Observer, April 26, 1890.
78 Daily State Chronicle, May 7, 1890.
79 News and Observer, August 13, 1890.
80 News and Observer, August 23, 1890.
81 State Chronicle, September 9, 1891.
82 Thomas H. Sutton to Samuel A. Ashe [? no inside address], March 28, 1892,
Ashe Papers.
Raleigh—An Example of the "New South"? 275
having decreased her illiteracy rate some 13 per cent.
83 In his annual
report, the North Carolina state superintendent of public instruction
in 1890 voiced a plea for teachers who were trained. He said, "I
believe that professional training is as necessary for a teacher as for
a physician." He deplored the fact that teachers taught only until
marriage or a good business offer came along, and he praised the
German professional attitude toward teaching.84
Among the early voices raised for improvement of education was
that of Walter Hines Page, who in 1884 in Raleigh organized the
famous Watauga Club. Among those inspired by Page to do some-thing
about the problem were Charles Mclver and Edwin A. Alder-man,
85 both of whom later had outstanding careers as educators.
Page's most famous speech in support of education was "The For-gotten
Man," delivered in 1897 at the new State Normal College for
Women in Greensboro.86 Mclver and Alderman began the task of
holding summer institutes for teacher training.
87 A winter institute
was held in Wake County by Alderman in 1890, to which both the
general public and the teachers were invited.88 By 1895 a teacher
could attend summer school at the University of North Carolina and
be refreshed on Herbartian pedagogy, educational psychology, Latin,
history, English, and the sciences—a total choice of 26 courses offered
by 19 instructors.89 In Raleigh around 1883 a book seller, Alfred
Williams and Company, started publishing the North Carolina
Teacher, a magazine intended to advertise books but also to promote
progressive education.90
The state of North Carolina by law in the session of 1876-1877
authorized the first graded public schools. In a city of 2,000 people,
100 citizens might petition for a special tax to support a school, said
tax to be subject to a referendum. The tax might not exceed one-tenth
of 1 per cent on the value of property.91 In 1881 additional laws
83 Philip Alexander Bruce, The Rise of the New South, Volume XVII of The His-tory
of North America (Philadelphia: George Barrie & Sons, 1905), 344-345, herein-after
cited as Bruce, The Rise of the New South.
8i News and Observer, March 30, 1890.
85 Burton J. Hendrick, Life and Letters of Walter H. Page (Garden City, New
York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 3 volumes, 1922), I, 73, hereinafter cited as Hendrick,
Life of Walter H. Page.
86 Hendrick, Life of Walter H. Page, I, 74-79.
87 News and Observer, April 3, 1890.
88 News and Observer, December 2, 1890.
80 Malone, Edwin A. Alderman, 61.
90 Rose Howell Holder, Mclver of North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1957), 60.
91 William T. Dortch, John Manning, and John S. Henderson, The Code of North
Carolina, Enacted March 2, 1883 (New York: Banks & Brothers, Law Publishers, 2
volumes, 1883), II, c. 15, ss. 2654-2658, hereinafter cited as Code of 1883.
276 The North Carolina Historical Review
This photograph of the old Centennial School was taken in 1931. From files of
State Department of Archives and History.
created the position of superintendent of public instruction, set up
county school systems,92 and declared that the school year should
begin on the first Monday in December.93
Taking advantage of these provisions, Raleigh in 1877 became the
second city in the state to set up a public graded school.
94 This was
appropriately named Centennial School. Not a great deal is known
about this school until 1884, when the Board of Aldermen began to
look for a better home for the school. By action of the board, the old
Governor's Palace was purchased from the state for $10,000, a little
over half being paid in cash.95 After investigating the cost of remodel-ing,
the board decided to erect a new building on the same site. This
new school was to have a "Slate Roof, Brown Stone Window sills and
Penitentiary Press Brick Front." 96 Although $15,000 was appropriated
for the building, an additional $10,000 was needed to provide slate
blackboards, fences, cloakrooms, carpet on the platforms, water
closets, and stoves for the pupils.97 Finally, on November 30, 1885,
the new school was appropriately and ceremoniously dedicated.98 The
January report, however, indicated that the school had not enough
places to hang the children's wraps.99 The popular and hard-working
superintendent of the city schools during those years was Edward
92 Code of 1883, II, c. 15, ss. 2540-2542, 2545-2575.
93 Code of 1883, II, c. 15, s. 2587.
94 Edgar W. Knight, Public School Education in North Carolina (Boston: Houghton,
Mifflin, 1916), 313.
95 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, February 1, 1884.
98 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, July 3, 1885.
97 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, October 21, 1885.
98 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, November 30, 1885.
99 News and Observer, January 29, 1886.
Raleigh—An Example of the "New South" ? 277
Pearson Moses, formerly of Goldsboro, a man of "magnetic person-ality"
and known as "a lover of learning." 100 His annual report to the
Sublic in 1890 shows the influence of the new school of educational
leory. He remarked, "Observation rather than hearsay testimony
should be the basis of knowledge." He reported that the children
learned to draw from nature; that they used the phonic method of
reading; that arithmetic was being taught "objectively"; that compo-sition
had improved; that boys in the fifth, sixth, and seventh grades
were learning clay-modeling, paper and pasteboard work; that girls
in the first three grades were learning to sew. He expected the recent
introduction of vocal music to prove very popular. Moses pointed out
the need for good school libraries in the teaching of history and
advocated the teaching of at least one foreign language. He believed
that the geography lessons were poor, as they called for too much
memorization. Spelling he stressed: "The time for a child to learn to
spell a word is the instant the child has occasion to write that word
for the first time." He further declared that nothing but the three R's
year after year was not good enough for the education of an Ameri-can.
Ten-year-old boys should have botany, zoology, chemistry, as-tronomy,
mineralogy, and mechanics, to name a few courses which
he believed desirable in the graded school curriculum.101
Under the leadership of Moses, Murphey School for girls was es-tablished
and grew as did Washington Graded School for Negroes.
By 1888 Centennial had an enrollment of 408 boys and Murphey
had 454 girls.
102 No figures were found for Washington.
In 1888 a crisis threatened the Raleigh public schools; the Raleigh
School Committee ran out of funds on March 1. It will be recalled
that according to the state law, only one-tenth of 1 per cent tax could
be levied for the support of schools, which was inadequate for the
type of education Raleigh was attempting to provide. The school
committee requested the aldermen to apply to the state legislature
for the power to double the tax rate,
103 which the legislature oblig-ingly
did.104 Many conservative businessmen in the city, however,
opposed an increase in taxes for the current year, so that a comprom-ise
was effected in order to keep the schools open. This compromise
diverted money from city streets and improvements to meet the
100 M. C. S. Noble, A History of the Public Schools of North Carolina (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1930), 405.
101 News and Observer, March 30, 1890. ™ State Chronicle, September 21, 1888.
108 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, December 17, 1888. ™ State Chronicle, February 15, 1889.
278 The North Carolina Historical Review
current school needs, while a bond issue was to replace the street
funds. Thus taxes would not have to be increased until the following
year. A tuition fee of $5.00 was to be charged each pupil who took
Latin and higher mathematics.105 Thus the school year was com-pleted.
In June the referendum on doubling the school taxes was
held and carried by a vote of 2,688 for to 1,718 against.
106
In 1889 the economy-minded aldermen reduced the number of
grades from eight to seven, "it being the sense of this Board to dis-approve
of higher education in the graded schools at the public
expense." 107 Moses disapproved of this action heartily, suggesting
that the eighth grade was the best one for learning. If this grade was
to be lost, he recommended raising the entrance age to seven years,
for "I believe that one thousand dollars spent for the education of
children over twelve will do as much good as three thousand dollars
spent for those under eight or nine." 108 Thomas H. Briggs, secretary
of the Raleigh Graded School Committee, likewise disapproved of
the loss of the eighth grade. He asserted that "some of our brightest
pupils have been cut off entirely from school privileges just at a time
when they would be most benefited." He also regretted the tuition fee
for Latin, as it deprived many bright pupils of this training.
109 But
the decision of the aldermen was firm. As far as secondary education
is concerned, Raleigh did not have a public high school until 1904.110
The final characteristic of the New South may be called civic pride;
southern cities were acquiring parks, electricity, sewerage, "pure"
water, electric street cars, and paved streets.
111 As Daniels wrote in
the Chronicle:
The same spirit that established the "Centennial Graded School," also de-mands
and will secure well-paved, well-lighted and well-drained streets,
good police, efficient sanitary regulations, public parks, street railways,
Christian associations, public libraries and reading rooms, public hospitals
and dispensaries, water-works, homes for the destitute, art galleries, mu-seums,
night schools for workingmen, and the other manifold blessings of
modern civilization which are secured by public spirited co-operation as-sisted
by private generosity.112
105 State Chronicle, March 22, 1889.
108 State Chronicle, June 14, 1889.
107 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, February 7, 1889.
108 News and Observer, March 30, 1890.
109 News and Observer, March 30, 1890.
110 Mary Lynch Johnson, A History of Meredith College (Raleigh: Meredith Col-lege,
1956), 60.
111 Bruce, The Rise of the New South, 248.
112 State Chronicle, March 1, 1889.
Raleigh—An Example of the "New South"? 279
He implied criticism of the stinginess of certain Raleighites, saying:
"In Raleigh we put most of our money in the banks and we do not
boom." 113
If Raleigh would only build an opera house, a $100,000
hotel, a street railway to Pullen Park, a beltline railroad, and organize
a land improvement company, she would reach a population of
100,000 by 1900, wrote "A Believer in Raleigh." 114 The Daily Evening
Visitor pointed out, "There are a great many things to be done to
place our beautiful city in the front. Let us be up and doing. Give
politics a rest for two years." 115
One of the first modern improvements to reach the city was the
telephone. In 1879 an Edison telephone system was installed, the
first in North Carolina.116 Because of a patent fight in the courts,
however, in 1881 the Bell system replaced the Edison.117 Permission
was granted by the Board of Aldermen in 1881 for the Bell Telephone
Company to erect poles and run wires, provided the company paid
the city a tax of 80 cents per telephone per year.
118 By 1890 a total of
177 customers had installed telephones.119 In the same year a tele-phone
was installed at the State Fairgrounds for the convenience of
the businessmen and for use in case a telegram was received in the
city for any visitor to the fair.
120 Discussion was revived of the possi-bilities
of linking Durham and Raleigh by phone,121 but this was not
soon accomplished. The Postal Telegraph seems to have come to
Raleigh before Western Union, receiving a franchise in 1889.122 By
the following year the line to Savannah, Georgia, was finished and
messages could be sent there directly from Raleigh.123 Other connec-tions
were also made.
No city would be healthful or comfortable without an adequate
supply of water, and much of the time at each meeting of the Board
of Aldermen was taken up with discussions of wells, pumps, water
works, and the like. Beginning in 1870 the aldermen were urged to
proceed with "the establishment of water works on a scale commen-
113 State Chronicle, April 12, 1889.
114 Daily State Chronicle, September 5, 1890.
115 Daily Evening Visitor (Raleigh), November 4, 1890, hereinafter cited as Daily
Evening Visitor.
116 Marker on West Martin Street, Raleigh, indicating site of first telephone ex-chamnge.
See also scattered issues of the News and Observer, July-September, 1879. News and Observer, January 26, 1881.
118 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, December 9, 1881.
119 News and Observer, September 16, 1890.
120 News and Observer, September 13, 1890.
121 News and Observer, November 14, 1890.
122 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, February 1, 1889.
123 News and Observer, February 12, 1890.
280 The North Carolina Historical Review
surate with the demands of the city."
124 The minutes are filled with
petitions such as one requesting a well on Hillsboro Street west of
the railroad bridge, and a pump at the intersection of Person and
Edenton Streets.
125 By 1881 the city fathers had decided to plan a
city-wide water system,126 but they were still in the talking stage five
years later.
127 In 1888 the Raleigh Water Works Company supplied
water to public fountains but not to homes.128 The aldermen were
moved by civic pride in 1889 to require the water company to lay
water pipes to houses if enough customers requested such service
so that annual receipts per block amounted to $20.00.
129 More and
more people began to tap the water mains; the stockholders in the
water company were well pleased.130
Just at that juncture, the city
began to discuss owning its own water works in order to lower the
rates and perhaps attract industry. 131 This was done some time later.
In addition to water, a sewerage system was needed. Following
a long period of discussion, an engineer was employed by the alder-men
to prepare General Plans and Specifications for a Complete Sew-erage
System for the City of Raleigh, N. C. 132 The plans were duly
prepared and accepted and bids called for, but all bids were rejected
as being too high.133 The need remained, however, and a year later
a bond issue for sewerage and paving was submitted to the public.
"The Question Is: Shall We Go Forward Or Backward?" "Let us all
vote for Health and for Progress!" was printed in numerous boxes
scattered throughout the entire issue of the Chronicle.1™ On May 10,
1889, the bond issue carried,135 and by July 5 the pipe had been pur-chased.
136 The laying of the pipe cost the city $81,000 of its bond
issue,
137 but was finally completed six months later in January, 1890.138
The News and Observer proudly declared that "no better job can be
pointed to in the South" and congratulated the contractor for using
124 Daily Standard (Raleigh), January 6, 1870, hereinafter cited as Daily Standard.
125 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, February 6, 1880.
^Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, December 9, 1881.
127 News and Observer, January 28, 1886.
^Minutes of the Board of Alderman, January 6, 1888.
129 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, June 10, 1889.
130 News and Observer, January 21, 1890.
131 News and Observer, March 22, 1890.
132 General Plans and Specifications for a Complete Sewerage System for the City
of Raleigh, N. C. Brochure bound with Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, Febru-ary
3, 1888.
133 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, April 27, 1888.
134 State Chronicle, May 3, 1889.
135 State Chronicle, May 10, 1889.
136 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, July 5, 1889.
137 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, July 17, 1889.
^News and Observer, January 11, 1890.
Raleigh—An Example of the "New South"? 281
"home labor."
139 So many householders signed up to be connected
that they had to wait thirty days amid much complaining.140
Complaints about streets and sidewalks were numerous. On Martin
Street in 1870 were "Deep crevices and unsightly channels. . .
." 141
Passengers walking from the railroad station to the main street "are
in danger of falling into gullies and other mishaps," warned the
Weekly Era in 1873.142 Wet grass and weeds bordering the sidewalks
would drench the unwary citizen who was walking to work in the
mornings.143 The first portion of sidewalk to be paved was in front
of the post office, where granite slabs were laid in 1890.144 A certain
J. J. Hall in a letter to the newspaper gave several reasons for the
building of more sidewalks, as such action would "give employment
to many hands, circulate money, add greatly to the comfort of the
people, improve property and beautify our excellent city."
145 The
mayor asked for public reaction to the laying of brick sidewalks on
all the principal streets, with the property owners paying for their
own portions.146 The newspapers did not report the results of this
request.
The aldermen took positive steps to lay out and pave the city
streets, however. In the late 1860's and 1870's, Kemp P. Battle and
his wife "pleasantly explored" the city streets and found many places
needing new streets cut through. When he became an alderman, he
persuaded his colleagues to open up some of these new streets. A
friend said of Battle early one Sunday morning at Christ Episcopal
Church, "See Kemp Battle sitting yonder looking sanctified. He is
studying how he can open up another pew in the church." 147 The
first proposal to macadamize the city streets was made to the alder-men
in 1882,148 but instead the main streets were paved with Belgian
blocks three years later.
149
It was well that this was done, for the
General Assembly of 1884 had facetiously passed a bill to charter a
ferry boat company to run a ferry on Fayetteville Street.
150
It was
finally decided to macadamize other streets and assess property
189 News and Observer, January 16, 1890.
140 News and Observer, February 18, 1890. m Daily Standard, January 3, 1870.
142 Weekly Era (Raleigh), December 18, 1873.
143 News and Observer, June 6, 1890.
144 News and Observer, July 3, 1890.
145 Daily State Chronicle, September 5, 1890.
1M News and Observer, October 5, 1890.
147 William James Battle (ed.), Memories of an Old-Time Tar Heel, by Kemp Plum-mer
Battle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1945), 227.
148 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, February 3, 1882.
149 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, July 3, 1885.
160 State Chronicle, February 2, 1888.
282 The North Carolina Historical Review
owners for the costs.
151 One observer thought the foundation rocks
looked so "formidable" that surely the paving was being done "once
for all time." 152 Many citizens looked forward to being able to drive
their buggies and carriages out to the suburbs on these newly paved
streets.
153 A street sweeper was purchased in October, 1890, to keep
these newly paved masterpieces in the best possible condition.154
At the opening of this period the city streets and most business
establishments were lighted by gas manufactured by Springfield Gas
Machines. 155 Electricity was beginning to be used, however. The first
public building to be lighted with electricity was the deaf, dumb, and
blind institute, where the new lights "illuminate both the buildings
and the grounds most beautifully and effectively."
156 A franchise was
granted to Thompson Houston Electric Light Company to install arc
lights in the city;
157
this was followed by a second such franchise
three years later.
158 When it was pointed out to the aldermen, how-ever,
that two such franchises could not exist simultaneously, the
second was revoked.159 In 1888 Raleigh streets had 100 gas lights
and 20 electric lights which burned all night; the cost to the city was
$3,000 per year.
160 Yet a continuous stream of complaints about the
poor lighting flooded the newspapers as they must have flooded the
aldermen. A strong diatribe appeared in the Raleigh Signal:
Why do we not have a better lighted city? The City of Raleigh is the
worse lighted city of its size in the country. The electric lights, as at present
arranged, are totally inadequate, "to say nothing of their illuminating
power." There ought to be an electric light on every corner, and if we
cannot have that, our City Fathers should go back to the gas lamps, which
afford equally as good lights as the present electric lights, taking into
consideration the fact that we would have more of them.
In the eastern section of our city, is the want of better lights particu-larly
felt. Some of the squares are in total darkness at night. Our citizens
are abundantly taxed and they should at least have a city thoroughly
lighted at night.161
An arbitration commission finally determined that the lights were
actually not as bright as they were guaranteed to be, therefore the
151 News and Observer, June 18, 1890.
152 News and Observer, May 9, 1890.
153 News and Observer, January 12, 1890.
154 North Carolina Intelligencer, October 8, 1890.
155 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, January 2, 1880.
158 News and Observer, January 16, 1886.
157 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, October 14, 1885.
158 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, February 10, 1888.
159 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, February 27, 1888.
160 State Chronicle, March 2, 1888.
161 Raleigh Signal, October 24, 1889.
Raleigh—An Example of the "New South"? 283
city did not have to pay the full amount of the light bill.
162 To cap
the climax, one night the "so-called electric lights" went out eight
times, reported the Chronicle. Even when they were on, "they give
no more light than a good-sized student lamp or seven or eight
tallow candles"; the paper concluded satirically, "What pine-knot
power are the electric lights?" 163 The aldermen purchased sixty new
gas lights,
164 which were installed and resulted in great improvement
in the situation.
165 By 1894, however, most of the problems with the
early electric lights were solved and Raleigh citizens formed an elec-tric
light company, with most of the stock home owned.166 A new
day had dawned.
Public transportation also underwent a revolution. In 1881 four-horse
and two-horse omnibuses plied the city streets on regular
runs.167 By 1890 a number of tracks existed for horse-drawn trolley
cars.
168 The electric cars doomed the horses, however, just as electric
lights replaced gas ones. The first city to install electric cars was
Montgomery, Alabama, in 1886. Asheville in 1889 had the first ones
in North Carolina,169 Winston acquired them in 1890,170 and Raleigh
soon followed suit. In November, 1890, the aldermen decided on six
miles of electric track with overhead wires; this was an extension of
two miles more than already existed for the horse-drawn trolleys.
171
The cars were to run on a seven-minute schedule.172 The final con-tract
was signed with Edison Electric of New York for ten miles of
track,
173 and the first car on Hillsboro Street ran in September, 1891.174
The city was taking on a modern appearance and tempo.
The fire department was probably as good as, if not better than,
that of other comparable cities, in spite of certain peculiarities such
as the installation of a new fire alarm box downtown; the keys to the
box were kept in three neighboring stores.
175 There were eighteen
alarm boxes installed in residential areas; keys were always kept in
162 News and Observer, May 8, 1890.
103 Daily State Chronicle, June 28, 1890.
16i News and Observer, November 15, 1890.
105 North Carolina Intelligencer, January 7, 1891.
106 News and Observer, August 24, 1899.
167 A tax was levied on these. Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, August 5, 1881.
168 News and Observer, July 19, 1890.
169 John Anderson Miller, Fares Please: From Horse-Cars to Streamliners (New
York: Appleton-Century, 1941), Chapter 3, passim.
170 News and Observer, August 12, 1890.
171 News and Observer, November 19, 1890.
172 News and Observer, November 25, 1890.
173 News and Observer, December 21, 1890.
174 State Chronicle, September 3, 1891.
175 News and Observer, March 18, 1890.
284 The North Carolina Historical Review
one of the homes.176
Justification for belief that the protection was
probably quite good is shown by the number of contests in which
the various hose or reel companies won honors. For example, at the
state contest at Charlotte in 1890, the Raleigh Capital Hose Company
kept a previously-won gold medal.177 The equipment was kept up to
date, with a "magnificent, shiny, glossy, brand new, red and blue light
service city hook and ladder truck" being purchased at one time and
horses being mentioned several times as new purchases.178 Items of
praise for quick work were noted in the newspapers.179
Attention was given to the care of public buildings. At the city post
office, 231 new boxes were installed in April, 1890,180 and in June a
"new, nobby and pretty little general delivery window" was in-stalled.
181 The public auditorium, Metropolitan Hall, was improved
by the installation of water closets in the dressing rooms and a freight
elevator for scenery and luggage.182 The jail received a new brick
kitchen and a fresh coat of paint on the fence in 1886,183 but by 1890
it needed to be "somewhat sweetened up" again.184 A new railroad
depot was badly needed, according to all reports, and the city was
anxious to build one, partly as an inducement to the Atlantic Coast
Line to come into Raleigh. 185 Although the Atlantic Coast Line did
not do so, a $75,000 depot was built.
186
The public park movement which spread in the 1890V87 did not
find Raleigh lagging. Two city parks had already been established
by that time; Pullen Park was dedicated to driving and picnicking,
with a pavilion and a pond with fifty goldfish for entertainment; and
Brookside Park which could be reached by streetcar included swim-ming
and baseball areas as well as picnic grounds.188
Beginning in 1890 the city underwent a period of expansion from
its previous narrow limits into suburban developments. Three land
promotion companies began residential developments in that year,
among the leaders being many of the same men who had promoted
176 News and Observer, April 1, 1890.
177 News and Observer, May 22, 1890.
178 News and Observer, July 1, September 6, 1890.
179 News and Observer, December 29, 31, 1889.
im News and Observer, April 12, 1890.
181 News and Observer, June 22, 1890.
™2 News and Observer, January 17, May 13, 1890.
183 News and Observer, January 23, 1886.
184 News and Observer, April 22, 1890.
185 News and Observer, February 19, 1890.
188 North Carolina Intelligencer, October 1, 1890.
187 Harvey Wish, Society and Thought in Modern America, Volume II of Society and
Thought in America (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 2 volumes, 1952), 281.
188 News and Observer, May 17, July 20, 1890.
Raleigh—An Example of the "New South"? 285
the cotton factory as well as newspaper editor Josephus Daniels. In
September Daniels called for "the organization of a strong and vigor-ous
land and improvement company" as "about the only thing the
town is behind in now." 189 In November he was a stockholder in such
a company.190 Of course the city long ago outgrew the suburbs of the
1890's.
Since the days of Walter Hines Page, Raleigh had become imbued
with the spirit of the New South. Gone was the old lethargy, gone
were the red clay streets. Citizens pointed with pride to their prog-ress
and their hopeful future. The list of new enterprises was indeed
a long and creditable one, although one must always remember
that most of them were small in size. Raleigh never became a Bir-mingham
or an Atlanta in spite of all that some of its promoters
could do. Yet Captain Ashe could justifiably say that Raleigh "grows
steadily and surely adds strength and accumulates vigor, and, like
the well built clipper ship, spreads her sails to favoring breezes and
passes on to certain success." 191 James A. Weston of Hickory could
say to Captain Ashe, "Inter nos, I always put Raleigh a little ahead of
any other place." 192 Mayor A. A. Thompson could congratulate the
aldermen on "the great progress made by the city during the past
two years, the improvements made and those projected, the excellent
financial condition of the city and . . . the hope that the advancement
of the city in all respects would be still more marked in the future." 193
And while Jo6ephus Daniels stretched the truth when he declared
that the population of Raleigh in 1891 was over 18,000, he could
truthfully say that "Raleigh is blessed with a past, a present, and a
future that is exceedingly gratifying and bright." 194
In conclusion, Raleigh appears to have possessed a fair share of the
New South's spirit of reconciliation with the North. It had a crusading
newspaper editor in the person of Daniels and a few enthusiastic
industry hunters such as Colonel Primrose and Major Tucker. It en-dorsed
public elementary education and tried to modernize the
appearance of the city. Raleigh was, then, a reasonably good example
of the New South even though it was not in the mainstream of devel-opment.
It remains to be seen whether additional studies of other
fringe communities will result in similar conclusions.
M
188 Daily State Chronicle, September 2, 1890.
190 The Raleigh Land and Improvement Company, Daily State Chronicle, Novem-ber
9, 1890. The same issue announced the West Side Land Company while the North
Side Land Company was reported in the Daily Evening Visitor, December 2, 1890.
191 News and Observer, October 16, 1890.
182 James A. Weston to Samuel A. Ashe, September 5, 1889, Ashe Papers.
198 Minutes of the Board of Aldermen, May 7, 1889.
194 State Chronicle, September 9, 1891.
A CARPETBAGGER'S CONVERSION TO
WHITE SUPREMACY
By Wilton B. Fowler*
At Chester, South Carolina, in August, 1870, the carpetbag attor-ney
general of the state excoriated his "fair-headed, blue-eyed Saxon"
audience for refusing to accept the equality of Negroes and instead
"sneering at every breath at the ignorance of those whom you and
you alone have made ignorant." * The same man, Daniel Henry Cham-berlain,
thirty-four years later—long after Negro political power had
withered in South Carolina—appeared as a "hearty supporter of the
mass of the Southern whites in their relations to the negro." Con-fessing
his own physical repulsion at the Negro race, he considered
the goal of social or political equality for the Negro an impossibility
"within any measurable range of time, if ever." 2
This was a dramatic change in heart by a man whose experience
in Reconstruction lent authority to his opinions. And since he did not
keep his opinions to himself, it is likely that he influenced some of
the Americans who around the turn of the century concerned them-selves
with the Negro's situation. A survey of his expressed thoughts
reveals the stages of the metamorphosis of a champion of equality
into a racist.
The young Chamberlains attitudes took shape in the morally agi-tated
environs of Worcester County, Massachusetts, where he was
born in 1835. As a student and tutor in the Worcester High School
during the 1850's he became an advocate of emancipation and dab-bled
in the movement for women's rights. The teachings of Charles
Sumner, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips impressed
him deeply. He later recalled that he had heard Phillips speak no
less than fifty times. It was Phillips' style of oratory that Chamberlain
imitated as a student politician at Yale College.3 Elected valedictory
* Mr. Fowler is an instructor in history at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
1 D. H. Chamberlain, Speech at the Mass Meeting in Chester, S.C., August 19, 1870
(Charleston: Privately printed, 1870), 4.
2 D. H. Chamberlain, Present Phases of Our So-Called Negro Problem. Open Letter
to the Right Honorable James Bryce, M.P., of England (Charleston: Privately printed,
1904), 6-7, 27, hereinafter cited as Chamberlain, Our So-Called Negro Problem.
3 James Green, Personal Recollections of Daniel Henry Chamberlain (Worcester:
Davis & Banister, 1908), 3-6, hereinafter cited as Green, Personal Recollections;
A Carpetbagger's Conversion to White Supremacy 287
speaker for his class (1862), he addressed his fellows on the obliga-tions
of the "Scholar in the Republic." A paramount duty, he urged,
awaited the educated man in public office. Politicians were the ones
who had to deliver the country from the evil of slavery, and in such
an undertaking zeal alone would not suffice: ". . . in this age, and
especially in this country, we need not more activity but more wis-dom
in all the relations and departments of civil and public life."
4
From Yale Chamberlain, still borrowing money for tuition, moved
on to the Harvard Law School, resisting until the beginning of 1864
the temptation to go to war. To friends who told him he could do no
more in the army than someone less educated, Chamberlain replied
that if he did not enlist, "years hence I shall be ashamed to have it
known that for any reason I did not bear a hand in this life-or-death
struggle for the Union and for Freedom." Governor John Albion
Andrew gave him a lieutenancy in the predominantly Negro Fifth
Massachusetts Cavalry, which saw duty in Virginia.5
Shortly after returning to Massachusetts at the end of the war,
Chamberlain journeyed south to settle the affairs of a deceased class-mate,
James P. Blake, who had left New Haven, Connecticut, to
practice law at Charleston. Once in South Carolina, Chamberlain
sought to improve his fortune by planting cotton on Wadmalaw
Island. He also took a retainer to prosecute claims in New Orleans
for "someone who had been stripped of his property in cotton by
government seizure." The planting did not pay, but legal practice
did—to the extent of enabling him to repay the more than $2,000
owed on his education.6
In the fall of 1867 Chamberlain won election to the South Carolina
constitutional convention, where he insisted that all public schools
be racially integrated. From 1868 to 1872 he held the elective office
of state attorney general. Little is known of his life during this period,
except that he opposed repudiation of the state debt, married Alice
Ingersoll of Maine, and formed a law partnership with Samuel W.
Melton, a native Carolinian whom people "thoroughly and rightly
Walter Allen, Governor Chamberlain's Administration in South Carolina (New York:
G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1888), 524-526, hereinafter cited as Allen, Chamberlain's Ad-ministration;
William Lloyd Garrison to D. H. Chamberlain, October 16, 1876, quoted
in Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 402.
4 D. H. Chamberlain, The Scholar in the Republic: Valedictory Oration, Class of
1862, Yale College, June 25, 1862 (New Haven: Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor, 1862),
22.
5 Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 525.
6 Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 526; Green, Personal Recollections, 8. Cham-berlain
described the handling of Blake's affairs in a letter to Eli Whitney Blake,
January 27, 1867, Blake Family Collection, Yale University Library, New Haven,
Connecticut.
288 The North Carolina Historical Review
trusted." 7 In 1870 the attorney general admitted that "excesses and
crimes . . . have disgraced our State since the close of the war," but
stanchly defended the Radical administration as the protector of the
Negro. It was especially commendable, he thought, that Negroes had
not taken revenge on the white minority, which had persistently
opposed the elevation and enfranchisement of the freedmen. Against
the contention that Radicals were spendthrifty and corrupt, he ex-hibited
a list of new services provided by the state to a citizenry
more than double that of 1860 because of the inclusion of Negroes.
At any rate, he argued, the "debt which this State, its property and
its present intelligence, owes to the colored race, to all her unedu-cated
children, can never be fully discharged." 8
From 1872 through 1874 Chamberlain occupied no public office.
He did, however, sit on the board of trustees which integrated the
University of South Carolina. When several faculty members re-signed
because of the admission of a Negro ( who happened to be the
secretary of state), Chamberlain drafted the resolution accepting
their resignations and welcoming the removal of their racist influence,
"so hostile to the welfare of our State." By 1877 the university, which
he called "the common property of all our citizens without distinction
of race," had a predominantly Negro student body.9
At the same time that he pursued advancement for the Negro,
Chamberlain sympathized with the complaints of white property
owners against wasteful government. As owner of stock in a printing
firm, as the "leading attorney" for some New York bankers, and as a
holder of state bonds, he was something of a propertied man himself.
At the Taxpayers' Convention called by Conservatives in Columbia
in 1871, Chamberlain was selected as an official, spoke out for econ-omy
in government, and recommended proportional representation
as a check on the influence of the ignorant and propertyless. That
he hoodwinked the convention or that he stole from public funds,
often alleged, was not proved. He flatly denied all charges of dis-
7 John S. Reynolds, Reconstruction in South Carolina, 1865-1877 (Columbia: State
Co., Publishers, 1905), 507, hereinafter cited as Reynolds, Reconstruction', Allen,
Chamberlain's Administration, 6-9; Green, Personal Recollections, 11; Francis Butler
Simkins and Robert Hilliard Woody, South Carolina During Reconstruction (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1932), 127, hereinafter cited as Simkins
and Woody, South Carolina During Reconstruction-, Edward J. Maxwell, "Hampton's
Campaign in South Carolina, I," South-Atlantic, I (February, 1878), 329-330.
e D. H. Chamberlain, Speech in Columbia, S.C., October U, 1870 (n.p., n.d.), 1, 4,
12, 14.
9 Daniel Walker Hollis, "Robert W. Barnwell," South Carolina Historical Magazine,
LVI (July, 1955), 136-137.
A Carpetbagger's Conversion to White Supremacy 289
honesty or deception,10 and in 1878 he "manifested the greatest
willingness" to stand trial under a Redeemer indictment (dismissed
inl881).n
In 1874 Chamberlain ran as the Republican candidate for governor
on a platform of reform. Because he promised a program of re-trenched
spending and honest administration, the Democrats did not
offer an opponent, and an "Independent" aspirant was beaten by a
vote of 80,403 to 68,814.12 Chamberlain's inaugural claimed honesty
and economy to be his paramount concerns. His ultimate goal, how-ever,
was "nothing less than the reestablishment of society in this
State upon the foundation of absolute equality of civil and political
rights."
13 Nothing here, or in his subsequent achievement of a public
accommodations act (prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race
or color), indicated those unspecified "tendencies toward his later
conversion to white supremacy" which one scholar detected in Cham-berlain
as governor.14
Conservative opinion of the Chamberlain regime was at first cau-tious,
then enthusiastic. The Charleston News and Courier congratu-lated
the Governor for not forsaking his campaign pledges, as
Conservatives thought he would, and promised to co-operate in his
program of good government. By April, after Chamberlain had vetoed
a tax increase and a bill to liquidate allegedly fraudulent state debts,
the paper predicted that his performance, if continued, would mark
him in history as the "saviour of South Carolina." Nor had he lost
the support of Negroes. One spokesman, Richard T. Greener, felt,
after first suspecting a "sellout" to the Conservatives, that Chamber-lain's
actions had operated "to shut the mouths of the insincere Con-servatives
and assure the honest grumblers." 15
With favorable comment from the state's press and accolades from
the Charleston Chamber of Commerce, the Governor continued his
attempt at political co-operation between Negroes and white busi-nessmen.
But late in 1875 his party undermined his program. While
he was away from the capital, Republican legislators elected to judge-ships
two men with reputations of notorious corruption, W. J. Whip-
10 Simkins and Woody, South Carolina During Reconstruction, 156-164, 181n, 203-
204; Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 143-145, 491-501.
11 David Duncan Wallace, South Carolina: A Short History, 1520-19US (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 1961), 595, hereinafter cited as Wallace, South
Carolina.
13 Simkins and Woody, South Carolina During Reconstruction, 473.
"Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 11, 28.
"Reynolds, Reconstruction, 291; George B. Tindall, South Carolina Negroes, 1877-
1900 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952), 11.
15 Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 111-113.
290 The North Carolina Historical Review
per, a Negro, and F. J. Moses, Jr., the preceding Governor. Conserv-atives
were indignant, and Chamberlain, obviously to discipline
Republicans, predicted the revitalization of the Democratic party.
He refused to endorse the commissions of the judge-elects, thereby
gaining the gratitude of some whites, who held rallies throughout
the state in his support.16
A short time later the Governor wired an ambiguous appeal to the
annual meeting of the New England Society of Charleston:
The civilization of the Puritan and the Cavalier, of the Roundhead and
the Huguenot, is in peril. Courage, Determination, Union, Victory, must
be our watchwords. The grim Puritans never quailed under threat or blow.
Let their sons now imitate their example
!
17
What constituted the "peril" he did not specify, but clearly he feared
what he had fought to prevent, a political polarization along a racial
line. The legislature by choosing Whipper and Moses seemed to
repudiate the policy of good government with which Chamberlain
attracted white voters. Now many of the latter looked more favorably
on General Martin W. Gary's "Mississippi plan" for intimidating
Negroes into either voting Democratic or abstaining. Gary's followers,
preparing for the biennial elections, so intimidated Negroes by April,
1876, that Chamberlain warned he would ask for federal protection
for them. After the May lynching of six Negroes in Edgefield ( Gary's
home county), he advised President Ulysses S. Grant to be prepared
to send in troops. He again alerted Grant in July following the Ham-burg
riot, which he described as "a darker picture of human cruelty
than the slaughter of Custer and his soldiers." On into the fall the
Governor risked white votes by condemning Democratic terrorists.
However enthusiastic their support of his financial policies, most
whites deserted Chamberlain because of his insistence on racial equal-ity.
18
At the peak of the gubernatorial race, Chamberlain was in physical
danger. He seemed unmoved, however, by the shuffles, insults, and
threats from Democratic ruffians—often armed.19 Responding to the
16 Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 157, 195-198.
17 Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 201.
18 Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 307-313; Reynolds, Reconstruction, 346;
Wallace, South Carolina, 594; Hampton M. Jarrell, Wade Hampton and the Negro
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1949), 49-50, accuses Chamberlain
of using the Hamburg riot for political purposes.
19 Regarding Chamberlain's courage in confronting armed hecklers, see W. W. Ball,
A Boy's Recollection of the Red Shirt Campaign of 1876 in South Carolina (Colum-bia:
State Co., Printers, 1911), 14.
A Carpetbagger's Conversion to White Supremacy 291
News and Couriers invitation to ditch the Republican campaign and
work for General Wade Hampton's election, he chided the news-paper
for having yielded to the brutal and bloodthirsty "spirit of
Edgefield." Later the Democratic party chairman attacked the Gov-ernor
for not calling upon the white party to help suppress the
terrorism which was accompanying the electioneering. Chamberlain's
reply did not show deference to Democratic sensibilities:
To entrust the protection of those who are today endangered by the
present disturbances of the armed, mounted, unlawful, Democratic Rifle
Clubs would, in my sober judgment, be as unnatural and unfaithful in me
as to set kites to watch doves, or wolves to guard sheep.20
Grant sent troops to guard the polls during the election, during
which enough frauds occurred to make the outcome contestable.
Negroes did vote, however, and almost all counties with preponder-antly
Negro populations returned majorities for Chamberlain. Ac-cording
to the Republican tally, Chamberlain won by 86,216 to
83,071 votes.
21
Without military protection Negroes probably would not have
risked white enmity by voting for Chamberlain. When federal
troops were withdrawn in April, 1877, as a result of President Ruther-ford
B. Hayes' "Compromise of 1877," Chamberlain surrendered his
office to Hampton. In January Chamberlain's wife had nervously
written to William Lloyd Garrison her fear that blood would flow
before the contest for the governorship ended. But in an orderly
transition, Chamberlain graciously exchanged correspondence with
Hampton and took leave of South Carolina after explaining to his
followers that they had been betrayed by Hayes. Negroes were, he
declared, victims of a new political doctrine which required that a
majority unable to maintain its position by physical force had to
submit to political servitude.
22 Privately he wrote:
I see no present hope for the colored race here. It would have been better
if they had never had the ballot. Poor race, I could wish they could make
their flight to some other land, even if it were beyond the reach of the
white man's civilization. Horace Mann is said to have remarked in his
last days that the trouble with him had been that "he was in a hurry but
God was not." 23
20 Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 361-363, 387.
21 Reynolds, Reconstruction, 393-394; Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 444.
22 Alice I. Chamberlain to William Lloyd Garrison, December 26, 1876, William
Lloyd Garrison Papers, Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts, hereinafter
cited as Garrison Papers; Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 480-483.
23 D. H. Chamberlain to Francis J. Garrison, April 8, 1877, Garrison Papers.
292 The North Carolina Historical Review
From Columbia Chamberlain proceeded to New York City and to
senior rank in the law firm of Chamberlain, Carter, and Eaton. Still
a Republican, he resisted blandishments from Hayes, expressed
"pride and satisfaction" in his record, and continued to support Negro
rights. In a letter to William Lloyd Garrison he charged that South-ern
Republicans had been sold in
as distinct a bargain as ever existed which was not signed and sealed on
paper. And the South is not to be blamed . . . but rather those leaders,
like Evarts, who could never see their Constitutional obligations towards
the South till the offices were slipping away from their party.24
Those newly discovered constitutional obligations, necessitating the
withdrawal of troops from South Carolina, meant to Chamberlain
that his defeat was inevitable, for "the uneducated negro was too
weak, no matter what his numbers, to cope with the whites." 25
In a July 4, 1877, speech at Woodstock, Connecticut, the former
Governor drew considerable but not unanimous applause for his
denunciation of Hayes. The President's policy had, he said, per-mitted
the
abandonment of Southern Republicans and especially the colored race, to
the control and rule not only of the Democratic party, but of that class
at the South which regarded slavery as a Divine institution, which waged
four years of destructive war for its perpetuation, which steadily opposed
citizenship and suffrage for the negro—in a word, a class whose traditions,
principles and history are opposed to every step and feature of what
Republicans call our national progress since I860.26
Nor had Hayes been correct in invoking state rights to cover his
action. The question was not one primarily of state or national rights,
but rather one of national duty as expressed in Section Four of Article
Four of the Constitution.27
Chamberlain did not persist in a campaign against Hayes, as a
zealot of Garrisonian stamp might have. One of his listeners at Wood-
24 D. H. Chamberlain to William Lloyd Garrison, June 11, 1877, quoted in Allen,
Chamberlain's Administration, 504-505.
25 D. H. Chamberlain to William Lloyd Garrison, June 11, 1877, quoted in Allen,
Chamberlain's Administration, 504-505. On April 11, 1880, President Hayes wrote
in his diary: "I am not aware of a single instance in which a conspicuous Republican
of the South can be said to have been abandoned. Gov Chamberlain alone has not
received office, and he placed himself in an attitude of antagonism which precluded
it." T. Harry Williams (ed.), Hayes: The Diary of a President, 1875-1881 (New
York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1964), 270.
™New York Tribune, July 5, 1877.
27 New York Tribune, July 5, 1877.
A Carpetbagger's Conversion to White Supremacy 293
stock indicated the mood of northern people by rising at the end of
the speech and complaining that Chamberlain s views were unrep-resentative
of New England Republicans, who were in full sympathy
with the President.28 In private correspondence the next week Cham-berlain
agreed that it was desirable to have the "Southern question
settled and put aside, but it cannot be until justice is done—to all
alike."
29 Then for months he let the issue lie.
How much longer did Chamberlain advocate Negro rights?
The February, 1879, issue of the North American Review con-tained
his next statement on the matter. The article, "Reconstruction
and the Negro," like all his essays felicitously written, represented
the mature opinion of a reflective man. Beginning his argument on
the premise that the Negro's position had been the leading question
in politics for four decades, Chamberlain asserted that the two forces
which otherwise would have determined political ends—commerce
and empire—hated the race issue and wished to take the nation's
attention off it. Now that white rule, upon the demand of "business
and the desire for a formal national unity," was restored in the South,
people were asking whether universal suffrage had been a mistake.30
Conceding that Reconstruction failed to achieve complete success,
but also declaring that the present condition of the colored race was
intolerable, Chamberlain addressed himself to the charges that (1)
it was cruel to subject white people to Negro rule and (2) enfran-chisement
of the Negro had gone against nature by replacing "intelli-gence
and capacity" with "ignorance and inexperience." To the first
charge he replied that universal suffrage had not caused subjection
of the white race to Negro rule. The "sole cause" of the political
supremacy of the Negroes "was the willful and deliberate refusal of
the white race to contribute its proper and natural influence to the
practical work of government." As for the second charge, far from
violating any natural law, enfranchisement "was the dictate and ex-pression
of the highest morality applied to the affairs of government,
the recognition and protection of the natural and inalienable rights
of all men—the opportunity, without artificial shackles or hindrances,
to run the race of life."
31
Progress in reform in South Carolina, he continued, had compelled
28 New York Tribune, July 5, 1877.
29 D. H. Chamberlain to [?], July 9, 1877, Betts Collection, Yale University Library.
30 D. H. Chamberlain, "Reconstruction and the Negro," North American Review,
CXVIII (February, 1879), 161, hereinafter cited as Chamberlain, "Reconstruction
and the Negro."
31 Chamberlain, "Reconstruction and the Negro," 162-167.
294 The North Carolina Historical Review
acknowledgment even by many of those opposed to Negro suffrage
that the best assurance for future good government lay with the
Republican party. White supremacy came about only after "delib-erate,
organized violence in all its forms, supplemented and crowned
by the most daring and stupendous election frauds." All this was
presently being excused by the argument that the inability of a
people to cope physically and economically with its enemies was
proof that the people was not entitled to retain its political power.
To Chamberlain, "Such conclusions are as illogical as they are
immoral." 32
Again in 1880 the former Governor defended Negro rights and
related them to the moral issue of honest government. To President-elect
James A. Garfield he wrote that the treatment of the Negro in
the South was a "great national issue." But it was not worth Repub-licans'
time to attempt a restoration of suffrage unless incorruptible
appointees and candidates served the party in the South. The whites
of South Carolina, he said, "could never have been persuaded to
oppose my re-election but for the acts of a Republican Legislature,
in denying to them decent government and officers." Garfield invited
additional comments, and in his second letter Chamberlain offered
a warning that because free suffrage was prostrate, "all our great
national interests, economical and moral" were endangered. Many
Republicans were ready to compensate for the loss of Negro votes by
aiding "anybody at the South who breaks with the regular Democ-racy,
regardless of the merits of his cause." In Chamberlain's opinion,
Republicans by countenancing state debt repudiation movements,
like William Mahone's in Virginia, were dishonoring the party.33
Unfortunately, Garfield, who agreed with Chamberlain's observa-tions,
soon died and was succeeded by Chester A. Arthur, who co-operated
closely with Mahone and his Readjustors.34 In September,
1883, Chamberlain mourned the decline of "political morality and
public integrity," as evidenced by Mahone's success. The Readjustor
program, designed to renounce justly contracted public debts, was
patently immoral, nothing more than a fraud, so Chamberlain
thought. He perceived that Arthur was attempting to foster Repub-licanism
by dropping Negro-dominated factions for discontented
32 Chamberlain, "Reconstruction and the Negro," 170-172.
33 D. H. Chamberlain to James A. Garfield, December 28, 1880, in D. H. Chamberlain,
Political Letters, 1883 (n.p., n.d.), 19-24, hereinafter cited as Chamberlain, Political
Letters.
34 Stanley P. Hirshson, Farewell to the Bloody Shirt (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-sity
Press, 1962), 96, hereinafter cited as Hirshson, Farewell to the Bloody Shirt.
A Carpetbagger's Conversion to White Supremacy 295
white Democrats.35 Southern Republicans were again being betrayed,
this time in deference to the fiscally dishonest.
By 1884 Chamberlain was so disappointed in the Republican party
that he, along with numerous others, bolted the party and supported
Grover Cleveland for President. The change, he felt, was the party's,
not his. "The Republican party was never entitled to claim our sup-port,
except for the correctness of its principles and the fitness of its
candidates." 36 Never again a member of a party and distrustful of
politicians, Chamberlain leaned more and more toward the concepts
of laissez faire and state rights in his view of governmental responsi-bilities.
He felt that it was better to leave in private and local hands
the governance of society than to entrust it to party spoilsmen.
At Yale in 1887 he told members of Phi Beta Kappa that the North
had enough problems without tackling those of the South, which had
experienced "no race conflicts nearly as dangerous, stubborn or in-jurious
to combatants or communities as the conflicts which have
marked the North during the last year." In the same speech he con-demned
the Blair Bill, which proposed federal appropriation of money
for education, to be distributed to the states in proportion to their
illiteracy. The bill, said Chamberlain, smacked of federal supervision,
presenting the "gravest constitutional and practical questions." For
testing the acceptability of this and any similar legislation, he pre-sented
his listeners a rule of thumb: "In construing the Constitution,
the question is never, Is the power denied?' but, Is it granted?'
"
3T
He thought the Blair Bill failed this test and also the practical
requirement of necessity, because the poverty of the South was a
thing of the past. The southern states "not only now generally raise
as much money for public education by State taxes as the Northern,
but, in general, the public schools of the South are nearly as well
attended and as efficient as those of the North." Though much re-mained
to be done for educating the Negro, time, not federal money,
was the chief requirement. No approach to the problem was "so un-reasonable,
as well as unphilosophical, as a certain feeling ... of
over-haste and impatience to solve the problem at once and off-hand."
38
35 D. H. Chamberlain to John T. Dezendorf, September 17, 1883, in Chamberlain,
Political Letters, 9-13 ; Hirshson, Farewell to the Bloody Shirt, 106.
36 D. H. Chamberlain, "A Calm View of the Election," Independent, XXXVI
(November 13, 1884), 4.
37 D. H. Chamberlain, Education at the South. Address of D. H. Chamberlain, of
New York, before the Yale Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa, at Linonia Hall, New
Haven, Conn., February 9, 1887 (New York: Evening Post, 1887), 8, 16, hereinafter
cited as Chamberlain, Education at the South.
38 Chamberlain, Education at the South, 41-42.
296 The North Carolina Historical Review
Chamberlain had become an exponent of evolution. Later in the
year he identified "such men as Sir Henry Maine and Charles Darwin
as the discoverers, in a genuine sense, of new worlds—vast illimitable
domains of knowledge and wisdom." They had articulated a "law of
all natural existence," which explained the inexplicable and disclosed
"new lines and sure prophecies of advance not before dreamed of."
It was now obvious to him that reform had to be slow because prog-ress
was cumulative, stacking each new advance on the authority of
precedent. With John Ruskin he now saw
the work of living men not superseding, but building upon, the work of
the past ; all growing together into one mighty temple ; the rough stones
and the smooth all finding their place, and rising, day by day, in richer and
higher pinnacles to Heaven.39
Interpreting history as progressive in the long run, Chamberlain
could place the Negro problem in broader perspective. He reminded
Charleston sons of New England that both the Pilgrims and Hugue-nots
experienced the "austere glory of suffering" as well as the "inspir-ing
hope of triumph." Contemporary South Carolinians had to be
patient with their peculiar problem and base their hopes on the safe-guarding
of popular liberty. Thereby, at some unstated time, would
be attained the goal of "perfect freedom for all who hear God's image"
—presumably including descendants of non-Pilgrims, non-Huguenots,
and Negroes.40
Examining "The Race Problem at the South" in 1890, Chamberlain
asked whether, in view of the widespread suppression of the Negro
vote, the federal government or northern states had any duty to per-form
or right to assert. "My first answer," he wrote, "is that I do not
think any people which is free to help itself and does not, ought to
have help from others. The negro has been helped as no race was
ever helped before. He was set free by others, not by his own efforts
. . . and enfranchised by no efforts of his own." Secondly, the federal
government possessed no constitutional way to aid the Negro. The
Supreme Court's decision in 1883 on the Civil Rights statute (1875)
correctly made plain the Fourteenth Amendment's exclusive appli-cability
to states, not to individuals. Why was "it that the protection
39 D. H. Chamberlain, "The American System of Trial by Jury," Journal of Social
Science, XXIII (November, 1887), 85-86, 123-124, hereinafter cited as Chamberlain,
"Trial by Jury."
40 D. H. Chamberlain, The Character and Work of the Pilgrims of New England,
Speech at the Annual Dinner of the New England Society of Charleston, S. C, Dec.
23, 1889 (Charleston: E. Perry & Co., 1890), 10.
A Carpetbagger's Conversion to White Supremacy 297
which is sufficient for the white race is thought to be insufficient for
the colored race?" Why were no other groups subjected to the wrongs
of which Negroes complained? It was "because no other race or na-tionality
has the qualities of self-assertion and self-defense to so small
a degree." For this deficiency there was no legal remedy. The con-stitutional
limit of protection of the Negro had been reached.41
Henry Cabot Lodge's "Force Bill" of 1890 for regulating the elec-tion
of congressmen struck Chamberlain as partisan and impracti-cable.
Nearly all everyday interests of the Negro, he argued, lay
outside Congress' jurisdiction. If such were not so, the bill would still
achieve nothing because enforcement would require military coercion.
There seemed to Chamberlain no legal means at all to secure for the
Negro the vote, nor did he "regard the denial of the negro's or a
white man's right to vote ... as an occasion warranting the least
departure from our approved authoritative standards of constitutional
construction." After all, the colored people were "no longer 'the wards
of the nation.' They are an integral part of the great body of our peo-ple,
and new laws or attempts at new laws for the special advantage
or protection of that race are out of date, impossible, and mis-chievous."
42
Beyond the realm of laws and constitutions, beyond theories, which
he distrusted, and out of the lessons of actual experience, Chamber-lain
discovered a "sense ... in which votes are weighed and not
counted." When control of society was the question, as in South
Carolina in 1876, and in similar crises, "we shall find," he said,
that men cannot always be counted by polls, that men in these last resorts
must be weighed, that brains have weight, that blood tells, that exper-ience
is strength, that ancestry and history count, that race pride is a factor
of untold power, that a servile legacy is a legacy and condition which no
executive proclamation, no constitutional amendment can change or
remove.43
This empirical finding by Chamberlain, in which a contrary reader
might have discerned the outlines of a racial theory of history, led
him to conclude:
It is not good for the black race, not good probably for any race, to exer-cise
power or to stand in places of responsibility for which they are
41 D. H. Chamberlain, "The Race Problem at the South," New Englander and Yale
Review, XVI (June, 1890), 509, 512-516, hereinafter cited as Chamberlain, "The Race
Problem."
42 Chamberlain, "The Race Problem," 520-523, 511.
43 Chamberlain, "The Race Problem," 510-511.
298 The North Carolina Historical Review
unfitted or unequal. The rule of the numerical majority at the South from
1867 to 1876, wherever it prevailed, resulted in intolerable misgovern-ment.
44
In thirteen years the carpetbag Governor had become an eloquent
critic of his own government. The old reform days did retain, how-ever,
at least a sentimental attraction. In an 1892 attack on the Repub-lican
party for its stand on the tariff, which he considered the leading
issue of that year's presidential campaign, Chamberlain lamented
that the "great party of the war for the Union, of emancipation, the
party of Lincoln and Sumner," had "sold itself . . . unreservedly to
tariff beneficiaries and monopolists." His attitude toward government
protection of business, through tariffs or other means, paralleled his
attitude on government protection of Negroes: "The limit of the
rightful power of free government is the security of individual action
and effort. Any tariff . . . which does in fact favor or protect some
interests and not others is an evil, a violation of the principle of free-dom
and equality of rights and privileges." 45
Last in importance as an issue in 1892, Chamberlain announced,
was the "Force Bill." The country would never tolerate such a law
because it had only one purpose, the perpetuation of party power.
The South must be left to work out its own problems. If evils exist there
the only agencies competent to deal with them are the communities them-selves
most affected by such evils. If in some localities even a majority of
the voters cannot vote freely or safely, the evil must be left to be dealt with
by the voters who are concerned. No majority of voters in any American
community, when it becomes intelligent, responsible and experience [d]
in the use of the ballot, can be disfranchised by the minority. If the present
minority represents the vast preponderance of the intelligence, the prop-erty,
and the civil experience of those communities, how futile, how mis-chievous,
how unpatriotic to seek by outside agencies to give effect and
power to a mere numerical majority!46
By 1896 individual liberty meant for Chamberlain not the promo-tion
of political equality, as it had twenty years earlier, but the right
to save oneself from the rising tide of equality. He told the graduating
class at Northwestern University that he did not completely reject the
idea that all men are created equal. "But the truth has now dawned
on all clear-sighted men; it will shine more and more unto the perfect
44 Chamberlain, "The Race Problem," 510-511.
45 D. H. Chamberlain, The Political Issues of 1892, Speech at the Academy of Music,
Philadelphia, October 28, 1892 (New York: Albert B. King, 1892 [?]), 8-9, 14, herein-after
cited as Chamberlain, Political Issues.
40 Chamberlain, Political Issues, 35, 39.
A Carpetbagger's Conversion to White Supremacy 299
day;—that freedom as a fact, as a practical thing, is never, and never
can be, absolute." Under conditions of democracy, full suffrage, and
the idea of equality, broad inroads were being made into the old and
inherited domain of individual freedom. If the southern Negro was
a victim of thralldom, he was no worse off than the citizens of New
York, who suffered the tyranny "of the mob, the populace, the prole-tariat,
or the so-called organized forces of labor, the armies led by our
Debs, our Gompers, and our Powderly." Better conditions for both the
North and South would come only when the immigrants in the former
and the Negroes in the latter section acquired the Anglo-Saxon gen-ius
for self-government.47
To historians, Chamberlain's best-known statement on the Negro
and Reconstruction has been the one appearing in Atlantic Monthly
for April, 1901. There he wrote of the blindness of partisan zeal as
expressed by Radicals in congressional debates. Sounding like a man
who felt he had been used for base purposes, he saw that the primary
objective of the Republican party had been "to secure party ascend-ency
and control at the South and in the nation through the negro
vote." South Carolina whites had bowed to Radical domination in
1867 because they were stunned and adrift without a leader of John
C. Calhoun's stature. Even had they possessed competent leaders
willing to participate in a mixed government, the whites would have
been alienated from the Negroes.
It cannot be too confidently asserted that from 1867 to 1872 nothing would
have been more unwelcome to the leaders of reconstruction at Washington
than the knowledge that the whites of South Carolina were gaining in-fluence
over the blacks, or were helping to make laws, or were holding of-fice.
The writer knows his ground here; and there is available written
evidence in abundance to avouch all his statements and opinions,—evi-dence,
too, which will sometime be given to the world.48
At last provoked beyond endurance, South Carolina whites in 1876,
believing their choice was "between violence and lawlessness for a
time, and misrule for all time," chose the former. So had "people of
force, pride, and intelligence" ever done.49
As for the Negro in the year 1901, his welfare, according to Cham-
47 D. H. Chamberlain, Limitations of Freedom, An Address Delivered before the
Northwestern University, at its Commencement, at Chicago, June 11, 1896 (n.p.,
n.d.), 9-10, 20.
48 D. H. Chamberlain, "Reconstruction in South Carolina," Atlantic Monthly,
LXXXVII (April, 1901), 473-476, hereinafter cited as Chamberlain, "Reconstruction
in South Carolina."
49 Chamberlain, "Reconstruction in South Carolina," 481.
300 The North Carolina Historical Review
berlain, lay in the total reversal of "the spirit and policy of recon-struction
which brought on him this Iliad of woes." Through industry
and thrift he could gain all he needed of livelihood and education; any
gratuitous abundance or position would only promote his idleness and
unthrift.
Above all things, let him be taught that his so-called rights depend on
himself alone. Tell him, compel him by iteration to know, that no race
or people has yet long had freedom unless it was won and kept by itself
;
won and kept by courage, by intelligence, by vigilance, by prudence. . . .
Self-government under constitutions presupposes a firm determination, and
mental, moral and physical capacity, ready and equal to the defense of
rights. Neither the negro nor the white man can have them on other
terms.50
In 1904, in ill health and three years from death, Chamberlain was
still turning the Negro question in his mind. A series of letters, to
James Bryce and to newspapers, revealed his conclusions at the end of
a lifetime of inquiry. The lesson he drew from his term as governor
was "that with a preponderating electorate of negroes, it never was
within the bounds of possibility to keep up a bearable government."
There had been nothing strange either in the whites' seizure of govern-ment
or in the Negroes' submission to them. How, after all, could a
people which never lifted a finger against its own enslavement, a con-dition
which Anglo-Saxons would not have tolerated at any cost, have
been expected to demand or retain self-government? 51
Instead of criticizing white southerners, Chamberlain continued, the
northerner of 1904 should extend to them sympathy for their burden,
"greater than was ever before put on white men." Southerners knew
the Negro's limits and governed him and their actions accordingly.
Northerners familiar with the South saw the wisdom of the southern
policy and disabused themselves of the notion that education, "mean-ing
book knowledge, or literary and academic training," would end
the Negro's faults. "The three R's are all the average negro needs.
After that, industrial education, the training of the hand and eye for
work, is all that will help him . . . more than this is positively hurtful."
The "most idle, thriftless, worthless negroes one sees at the South, or
many of them, are what are called well-educated." 52
In a final insight into the race problem, Chamberlain found in the
Negro's own behavior the cause of his difficulties. It was "the nameless
50 Chamberlain, "Reconstruction in South Carolina," 483-484.
51 Chamberlain, Our So-Called Negro Problem, 24, 27.
52 Chamberlain, Our So-Called Negro Problem, 27-31.
A Carpetbagger's Conversion to White Supremacy 301
crime" of rape by Negroes of white women. Ordinarily opposed to
lynching, Chamberlain "came very near to saying" that he did not
blame the South for resorting to lynch law in the case of rape. And
was it not strange that Negro leaders did not realize that this was
the cause of so much racial conflict? When this "crime which first
caused lynchings" was made extinct by the Negroes themselves, all
that would be required to work out the race problem would be for
the whites to employ "the old, tried, commonplace virtues"—humane-ness,
helpfulness, patience—and a "readiness to yield and defend all
the ordinary civil rights." 53
It was of course Chamberlain's experience in South Carolina which
made his later comments on race significant, and it was that experience,
subsequent visits to the state, and correspondence with acquaintances
in the South which he cited as the bases of his conclusions. Given these
bases, there were certain patterns in his intellectual process which so
conditioned what he observed of the Negro as to be themselves of
basic importance. Disdain for the Republican party and bitterness at
the "spirit of party," 54 adoration of the law, insistence on strict con-struction
of federal powers, and confidence in evolution were such
powerful forces in his thought that there is the temptation to believe
that they—not field trips to the South—largely accounted for his re-versal
in opinion.
To understand Chamberlain's separation from the Republican party,
it is helpful to look at him as a member of the national party in the
1860's and 1870's, not just as a carpetbagger. Assuming that he was
an honest man possessing the views of New England Republicans and
recalling that he spoke out for reform in South Carolina as early as
1870, one can see that Chamberlain resembled those reform Repub-licans,
like Carl Schurz and Henry Adams, who bolted the party in
1872. Their failure not being lost on him, he remained to reform the
Republican party in South Carolina from within. After achieving large
success there, he voted at the 1876 national convention on the first
seven ballots for the presidential nomination of General Benjamin H.
Bristow, exposer of the Whisky Ring in Grant's administration.55
Even after Hayes betrayed him, Chamberlain retained some hope
for the party and for Negro suffrage. For a time he tried to persuade
Stalwarts to drive Hayes over "neck, heels, and boots to the Democ-
53 Chamberlain, Our So-Called Negro Problem, 7, 8, 16, 29.
54 Frederic Adams, Daniel Henry Chamberlain, by Frederic Adams; Read before the
Yale Class of 1862, June 25, 1907 (n.p., n.d.), 8, thinks Chamberlain never recovered
physically from the strain of 1877.
55 Allen, Chamberlain's Administration, 271; Matthew Josephson, The Politicos,
1865-1896 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938), 159-160, 213-214.
57
302 The North Carolina Historical Review
racy," so that the Republican position could be salvaged.56 Although
briefly inspired by Garfield's interest in his recommendations, he de-cided
by 1884 that Arthur's patently opportunistic handling of the
southern question and the party's endorsement of a heretical economic
policy doomed both political decency and the welfare of the Negro.
In supporting Cleveland, as he did actively in 1884 and 1892, he found
a candidate who was above all concerned with good government, who
advocated free trade, and who did not have to appeal to Negro votes.
In veering toward the Democratic party, Chamberlain seemed to ac-cept
its ideas on race as well as on civil service and trade.
After 1884 Chamberlain denied allegiance to any party. His view-points
conformed to those of Mugwumps, those political independents
who lived along the eastern seaboard, who were of Anglo-Saxon,
Protestant, and New England backgrounds, and who "generally ad
vocated tariff reductions, sound currency, and civil service reforms.
Like other Mugwumps, Chamberlain deplored the sectional appeal,
the waving of the "bloody shirt" in elections—often at the expense of
reform candidates. By 1890 he saw no way to ease the Negro problem
in the arena of party politics. It was better "to lay aside political agi-tation
of a question which is beyond the reach of political action." 58
Probably because of the uses he saw unsavory men make of the
powers of federal government, Chamberlain advocated a retraction
of those powers to their pre-Civil War status. In 1893 he complained
that the Legal Tender acts of 1862 and 1863 remained to "poison" the
nation's financial life, but thankfully the decisions in the Slaughter-house
Cases had saved the federal system from the "vagaries of the
era of reconstruction." 59 Thus restricted, the federal government
could do little to aid Negroes, but Chamberlain, like the Supreme
Court in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, believed that the Negro must
cease to be the special favorite of the law and take his place as a
mere citizen.
60
Chamberlain rarely criticized Supreme Court decisions. This was
so partly because the decisions pleased him and also because of his
adoration of the institution of the law. In his opinion the highest
56 Vincent P. DeSantis, Republicans Face the Southern Question (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Press [Volume I of the Seventy-Seventh Series of the Johns Hopkins Univer-sity
Studies in Historical and Political Sciences'], 1959), 105.
57 Hirshson, Farewell to the Bloody Shirt, 123.
58 Chamberlain, "The Race Problem," 518.
59 D. H. Chamberlain, "State Sovereignty Before 1789," Yale Review, II (November,
1893), 250-251.
60 United States v. Stanley, United States v. Ryan, United States v. Nichols, United
States v. Singleton, and Robinson and Wife v. Memphis and Charleston Railroad
Company, 109 U.S. 3 (1883).
A Carpetbagger's Conversion to White Supremacy 303
achievement of English-speaking peoples was the law, whose para-mount
concept was stare decisis, the use of precedent as authority.
Precedent too was the basis of society: "Our own American polity—
a Constitutional Democracy—draws its strength, and ever will draw
it, largely from such conservative forces as lie in the idea of stare
decisis." Precedent, law, continuity—these were the essential founda-tions
of civilization. That of the Greeks, with all its noble ideas, had
withered for lack of law.61
As an institution, the law seemed no more able than the Republican
party to deal with the Negro question. It was, however, a way of
conserving those old-time values which the Protestant church had
guarded in the past and which Negroes had to acquire if they were
to become self-governing. Self-reliance, private initiative, hard work—
the Puritan qualities—were icons which Chamberlain, who posthum-ously
published his rejection of the "whole Christian religion,"
62
transferred from the church to the shrine of law. The conservators of
the law which he helped to construct—the Yale Law School, the New
York Bar Association, and the American Bar Association—together
with the Supreme Court could defend American traditions against
the "mad waves of nullification, insurrection, anarchy, and social-ism,"
63 and, he might have added, premature Negro suffrage.
From worship of the Anglo-Saxon institution of law, it was no long
step to the "scientific" racism of the "law" of evolution. The studies
of Sir Henry Maine revealed to Chamberlain a natural history of
law,64 and from the writings of William Graham Sumner65 (whom
he knew), Herbert Spencer, Walter Bagehot, and John Fiske, he
found stages of evolution for races.
66 Obviously on a lower social level
61 D. H. Chamberlain, "The State Judiciary—Its Place in the American Constitutional
System," in University of Michigan Political Science Association (ed.), Constitutional
History of the United States as Seen in the Development of American Law (New
York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1889), 284, hereinafter cited as Chamberlain, "The
State Judiciary"; D. H. Chamberlain, The Doctrine of Stare Decisis (New York:
Baker, Voorhis and Co., 1885), 26, 30, 28, hereinafter cited as Chamberlain, Stare
Decisis.
62 D. H. Chamberlain, "Some Conclusions of a Free-Thinker," North American
Review, CLXXXVI (October, 1907), 194.
63 Chamberlain, "The State Judiciary," 285.
64 Chamberlain, "Trial by Jury," 1; Chamberlain, Stare Decisis, 28-29.
65 In 1885 Chamberlain thought that Sumner disliked him because of the South's
role in defeating Samuel J. Tilden, whom Sumner supported. D. H. Chamberlain to
Simeon E. Baldwin, August 22, 1885, Simeon E. Baldwin Collection, Yale University
Library. But in 1896 he spoke fraternally of "Bill" Sumner, praised his scholarship
and teaching, and reckoned that if the Yale administration were not "medieval"
Sumner would be the university president. D. H. Chamberlain, Debating and Parlia-mentary
Practice at Yale (New York: Privately printed, 1896), 13-14.
66 D. H. Chamberlain, The Power of History: An Address Delivered before the
Westborough (Mass.) Historical Society, January 19, 1899 (n. p., 1900[?]), 3-5 herein-after
cited as Chamberlain, Power of History; Chamberlain, "The State Judiciary,"
240-241; Chamberlain, "Trial by Jury," 41-42; Green, Personal Recollections, 12-13.
304 The North Carolina Historical Review
as a slave, the Negro also must have been on a lower level of devel-opment,
for, Chamberlain erroneously averred, the Negro never re-volted
against his enslavement. The one area in which the Negro did
manifest aggressiveness—rape—only damned him as barbaric in Cham-berlain's
mind.
Evolution also supported Chamberlain's opposition to imperialism,
just as it gave other racists arguments to the contrary. It was true,
he agreed, that nations could not stand still: "The law is—Progress
or Retrogression." But Americans in Hawaii or the Philippines would
not submit to the rule of Asiatic majorities and would have to suspend
their system of political and legal equality. Chamberlain, assuming
the inevitability of racial clashes, bade expansionists to heed the
"voice of warning" from South Carolina and to divert their energies
to the exploitation of North America.67
Evolutionists and conservatives, critics of democracy like Thomas
Carlyle, John Ruskin, Henry Maine, and W. E. H. Lecky, enhanced
for Chamberlain, upon his retirement, the study of history. If law
could institutionalize the civilization of Massachusetts, history could
popularize, could "keep," "advance," and "hand it on to the waiting
generations." The value of history to a people could easily be under-stood
by observing the sad, but natural, plight of the Negro with his
"absolute lack of anything that may be called ... a history." Were
it in his power, Chamberlain would have granted to the Negro the
greatest boon possible—not suffrage, public office, or education, but
"a record of ancestral character and achievements which would put
him on an equality with other . . . races of men." 68
So far as Chamberlain, after many years of thought, could reason,
the Negro in America must await his history, must "follow the exam-ple
of time itself, which indeed innovateth greatly, but quietly, and
by degrees scarce to be perceived." 69 Was he aware of the ironic
applicability of these last words to his own history?
67 D. H. Chamberlain, Imperialism, An Address before the Quaboag Historical Society,
Warren, Mass., Dec. 6, 1898 (North Brookfield: Privately printed, 1898), 1, 6-9.
68 Chamberlain, Power of History, 10, 15-16.
69 Chamberlain, Stare Decisis, 30, quoting Bacon.
JOHN ALEXANDER, ANGLICAN MISSIONARY
By Thomas C. Parramore*
The story of the advent, decline, and collapse of the Church of
England in America is one of immoderate futility. Aside from the
basic consideration that the desire to flee the authority of the estab-lished
church was a primary impetus to colonization, there were
numberless formidable obstacles to Anglican success in America.
These obstacles-—arduous passage to and travel within the colonies,
the notorious inadequacy of clerical stipends, the deprivations com-mon
to layman and cleric alike—came into focus during the efforts
of the church to recruit priests for service in the colonies. The gener-ations
during which the church basked in the favor of the crown had
not bred in the Anglican clergy sizable reservoirs of that zeal which
impelled one to forego a comfortable English benefice for the perils
of a frontier mission. While some tenuous case might be made for the
attractions of the more advanced colonies, the appeal of North Caro-lina,
by all accounts, might be compared with that of Siberia for the
subjects of the czar. Even with the Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel in Foreign Parts straining every resource, fewer than fifty
Anglican ministers ever accepted appointments in North Carolina
during the century in which the church labored there.1
The majority of forty-plus Anglican missionaries who eventually
came to North Carolina soon regretted it; many broke under the
physical strain or lapsed into irresponsible behavior after confronta-tion
with the challenge of service. Only a few withstood the hardships
and opposition in the colonies, including the final apocalypse of po-litical
revolution, without stain upon their integrity. The stories of
Daniel Earl and Charles Pettigrew have been told, that of John Alex-ander
has not.
Little is known of John Alexander before his appearance in North
* Dr. Parramore is assistant professor of history, Meredith College, Raleigh.
1 Sarah McCulloh Lemmon, "The Genesis of the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of
North Carolina, 1701-1823," North Carolina Historical Review, XXVIII (October,
1951), 436, hereinafter cited as Lemmon, "Genesis of the Protestant Episcopal
Diocese." This source gives forty-four as the number of Anglican priests licensed for
North Carolina. Names of forty-seven priests are given in Spencer Ervin, "The
Anglican Church in North Carolina," Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal
Church, XXV (June, 1956), 158-161, hereinafter cited as Ervin, "Anglican Church
in North Carolina."
306 The North Carolina Historical Review
Carolina late in 1762. He was born of a Scotch-Irish, Presbyterian
family in northern Ireland about 1738 and was educated at the famous
old grammar school established by Edward VI at Shrewsbury.2 Soon
after reaching years of discretion he was received into the Presby-terian
ministry and assigned a congregation in northern Ireland. He
was evidently an idealistic and adventurous young cleric for in 1762
he requested and was granted leave to travel in America for three
years to carry the Word to colonials. Doubtless inspired by a desire
to combat evil at the source, he chose as his mission field the province
of North Carolina, where large segments of the Scotch-Irish settlers
had never seen a minister of any denomination.
During the winter of 1762-1763 John Alexander earned his bread
by preaching to congregations in the western part of Beaufort County
(about to be cut off as Pitt County), where most of the population
professed Anglican sentiments. The experience was destined to change
his life, for the Reverend Alexander's principal convert was himself;
he became interested in the tenets of the Church of England and re-solved
to seek holy orders to continue his work as an Anglican mis-sionary.
Strongly supported by members of his congregations, he
applied to the Reverend Alexander Stewart, the missionary stationed
in that part of the province, for a recommendation to the Bishop of
London, before whom all candidates for ordination were required to
appear. Unfortunately, Parson Stewart had received an adverse im-pression
of the young Presbyterian's character and declined to give
his recommendation. In a letter to the society in the spring of 1763,
Stewart observed that the applicant had
wrought upon ye people so much in Pytt county, that they were preparing
a recommendation for him to ye Bishop of London, & ye Society [,] & I
had many enemies because I refused to sign ye recommendation. But he dis-covered
himself by his unguardedness and over hott temper too soon, &
by y* means stopp'd their proceedings.3
Describing Alexander as "between 25 and 30 years of age, tho' he
calls himself younger, a small man and mark